William Kentridge reflects on the absurdity in the world in a series of videos

How to describe the human disasters in the world around us? In the form of tragedy or comedy?reflects William Kentridge (Johannesburg, South Africa, 1955) in an interview with The Day: None of them feel right. The state of the world is not a joke, but the idea of ​​a tragedy also reduces it to individual arrogance or fallibility and we know that social processes are much more than that..

Conversing electronically from somewhere in Catalonia, Spain, the South African artist concludes: So for me an important category is absurdity.. With this vision, the viewer is placed before the series of videos Self-Portrait As A Coffee-Pot (Self-portrait as a coffee maker), which premiered on MUBI, in which he reflects out loud while drawing landscapes and symbolism that come to animated life.

Absurdity not as a joke or something necessarily funny, but as something that notices a break in logic and then is happy to follow that logic to the nth degree, as in the writings of Gogol, for example.

In the recent work for the digital screen, the internationally renowned creator converses before himself, in an intimate unfolding in his recording studio. When I was three years old I wanted to be an elephant. I failed at that. So I was reduced to being an artisthe points out in his philosophical and political monologue, of course with a lot of humor, while the screen shows the development of charcoal drawings and animations that characterize his work.

You start thinking you’re going to take a photo of the entire universe, but you end up with a coffee potexpresses in the first episode the artist recognized for his collagesdrawings and video art, as well as theatrical and operatic production.

In his conversation with The Dayremember your happy experience when exhibiting his work in Mexico a few years ago. With the global release of these films, it is wonderful to continue the conversation as if you were with the people who attended the exhibition and continue developing other topics.

Connection with Mexican art

He commented that he has always had a close connection with two moments of Mexican art: one is the extraordinary murals of Diego Rivera, particularly, and the other muralists. The second are the fantastic engravings by José Guadalupe Posada: Each of the artists, in some way, sits somewhere over my shoulder and inside the work.

His studio, to which you are invited when you begin the screening of episodes, functions as a space to talk about the way we construct ourselves and meaning. There are different themes that run through the series, such as the nature of the self, where we live and what our relationship is with destiny. I was interested in them before the series, but this one gave me the opportunity to explore them further..

The nine episodes created and directed by Kentridge are available worldwide on the MUBI platform from October 18. The recordings were made at his home in Johannesburg during and after the Covid-19 pandemic, between 2020 and 2022. According to the production company and online streaming channel, is a hymn to artistic freedom and the power of imagination, even when faced with the challenge of isolation in closed spaces.

The series was conceived about a year before the viral disease paralyzed activities, but it took a long time to make. And when the pandemic began it became clear that we would have lockdowns and travel would be restricted. It became possible to undertake it and the 18 months without traveling were extremely productive.

At first it was filmed with only Kentridge and an assistant who lived in his house. As the blockade eased, more collaborators intervened, but the pandemic and the conditions of the world set the tone for isolation, as if one were locked inside one’s head and with thoughts moving through it.

Part of Kentridge’s fame is due to his work with themes of colonialism and apartheid. Among a list of multiple awards, in 2017 he was recognized with the Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts. The jury commented that the South African In his work he has expressed emotions and metaphors related to history and reality in his country, which transcend the latter and raise essential questions of the human condition, combining themes in which purely poetic and aesthetic research predominates with those of socio-political content..

When defining himself on the cover of the series on MUBI, the artist declares: “I have never tried to make illustrations of the apartheidbut the drawings and films are certainly generated by and fed by the brutalized society that he left in his wake.”

He collage It is fundamental in its form of expression. This technique involves taking different fragments of the world and cutting them up, whether they are images or pieces of material, rearranging them and putting something back into the world. It is a very familiar process, very directly visible from the perspective.

In a more profound way “it alludes to the way in which all information or all knowledge is composed, like a collage, of different fragments: a larger portion of this memory, a smaller piece of that dream, this insult that one received and that one constructs oneself. But also an understanding of the world beyond oneself in this constructed way, taking different fragments to create a provisional coherence.”