WILLIAM KENTRIDGE, 9 DRAWINGS FOR PROJECTION
Lucca, Cappella Guinigi
September 30, 2022
Pictures: © William Kentridge. Courtesy Galleria Lia Rumma, Milan/Naples
Promoted by Scuola IMT Alti Studi
Curated by Ilaria Bernardi
On the occasion of Bright Night, the European Researchers’ Night, the Scuola IMT Alti Studi Lucca presents for the first time in Lucca, at the Cappella Guinigi, the screening of the first nine short animated films in the series Drawings for Projection by the international artist William Kentridge (Johannesburg, 1955).
Kentridge creates the entire animation sequence of each film from a single drawing that he modifies, adds, and subtracts little by little, photographing each change and working without script or storyboard. The particular animation technique used by the artist, who continuously draws, erases, and redraws parts of his charcoal sketches, allows for traces of the past to remain visible in the present.
Presented at the MoMA in New York in 2006 but made by Kentridge between 1989 and 2003, the 9 Drawings for Projection retrace the public and private story of Soho Eckstein, a wealthy South African landowner and land developer betrayed by his wife with her opposite number, Felix Teitlebaum, a quiet, dreamy man who reflects on life and questions what is happening in the world. Over the course of the series, against the background of South Africa’s changing political and social reality, Soho and Felix become instruments for the artist’s intimate and personal meditations on the turbulent history of his country.