Notes

Rather than read his way towards a conceptualisation of a project like The Magic Flute, Kentridge sets to work drawing, making prints, tearing scraps of paper, constructing mechanical figures, building mini theatres, moving ordinary objects around on a table, setting up a camera and testing projections against different backdrops. He seems to circle an idea, to circumscribe the slowly evolving themes of the work in the activities of drawing and building and printmaking. The work itself – the commission for which he is preparing – is like a stone caught in the centre of an ever-growing snowball of ideas and images, some of which are altered and inverted along the way, most of which find their way into the final project in some permutation or another.