William Kentridge

(Johannesburg, South Africa, 1955)

A multifaceted creator, his tentacular work mixes techniques and disciplines, developing his scenic and plastic work as Siamese bodies that feed off and complete each other. Kentridge expresses himself with sculptures, canvases, cutouts and collages, opera, video installations... The point of connection between the different supports is drawing, where the predominance of black and white connects the traditional texture of cinematographic film with graphic practices: charcoal, graphite, ink. His committed and political work has a metaphorical and poetic vocation. Drawings for Projection is a series of eleven short films that constitute a critical chronicle of South African history from apartheid to the present. His animation technique is laborious and artisanal, he draws with cabochon and pastel that he modifies by erasing, adding and reworking the elements. He films each stage of the process and continually modifies it, sometimes leaving “ghostly remains” of previous marks on the sheet. Kentridge thus visualizes the passage of time and the stratification of memory, one of the main themes of his work. More Sweetly Play the Dance, a spectacular moving frieze almost forty meters long and eight screens that evoke the dynamics of a ritual procession, a demonstration of the dispossessed, a flow of refugees escaping a crisis or a medieval dance of death.

Medialab screened Johannesburg, the second largest city after Paris (1989), one of the eight shorts in its series entitled Drawings for Projection, with Soho Eckstein, a real estate developer from Johannesburg, and the dreamer Felix Teitelbaum, his alter ego. The series unfolds the story of the two antagonistic alter egos, Eckstein, dressed in pinstripes, and Teitelbaum, who is naked, and focuses on their shared desire for Eckstein's wife. The plot unfolds against the backdrop of the collapse of South Africa's apartheid policy and the accompanying psychosociological predicaments that reflect the story. The wastelands and mines of Johannesburg speak to the power of Eckstein and its traumatic impact on the environment and its inhabitants.