William KentridgeThe World Is Leaking, 2023
“I really liked the paper we used for the project entitled ‘Oh To Believe in Another World’ in which we needed green-screen against which we filmed the actors, so for ‘The Great Yes, The Great No’, I have drawn on the green paper itself…. What remains is the idea of the garden as jungle, the idea of the exotic Caribbean which in fact is based on a domestic Johannesburg garden.
The texts and phrases on the drawings come from the theatre productions... The idea of a drawing that you read as a text, or a text that turns into in this case the garden, is an ongoing question, and an ongoing project, of text and image, reading and looking. How much you glean from what you read, and how much what you read is changed by what you’re seeing
around it.”
The garden in which this painting was created and which Kentridge alludes to above was his parents’, Sir Sydney and Felicia Kentridge’s, garden before him – so hosted many hours of meetings with Nelson Mandela, Albert Luthuli, Desmond Tutu, Steve Biko’s family and several of Sydney's other historic and courageous clients, and was therefore the venue for the creation of some of Africa, and history’s, most memorable, vital speeches.
Echoing those enduring words with phrases from the libretto of the 'The Great Yes, The Great No' including this work’s titular phrase 'The World is Leaking’, which is repeated often during the performance, this particular painting is also projected for a whole scene across the entire backdrop during the production, as it holds within its leaves and phrases much more than simply a study of an ordinary domestic garden. Johannesburg is the largest man-made forest in the Southern Hemisphere, as it is naturally Savannah grassland, and all of its trees were planted by human hands – so there is another layer of Kentridgean thought here in that ‘the Caribbean jungle’ represented here is a kind of theatrical green-screen for words and theatrically placed horticulture, as if each tree and plant are stage props on history’s stage.
