So the idea was to look at this hidden history of Africa in the First World War. Only 40 years after the war did the nationalist movements in the different African colonies come to a confidence and a strength to challenge Europe and gain their independence in the 1960s. What did you find out about Africans in WW1? In 1884 at the Berlin Conference the European countries had divided up all of Africa between themselves and one can see the First World War as a battle to rearrange who got which colonies. The enormous production features various creative disciplines. It was a war between France and Britain against Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but it was also – and this was much less appreciated – a war between those European countries as to who would get to own which countries in Africa.
So we came to the idea of the relationship of Europe to Africa with war, and the most interesting for me was the First World War. I’d worked on the war on the opera Wozzeck and had worked with actors and dancers in Johannesburg thinking about this other production. And that brought us back to the idea of the First World War. It’s an old military structure 85 metres long – so the idea came for a processional piece using that length, connected to the military. The production came from seeing a huge space in New York, the Park Avenue Armory, which I was invited to do a performance in. How was the idea for the production hatched? Senior lecturer in theatre Fiona Ramsay asked Kentridge about creating the work. It features music by Philip Miller and Thuthuka Sibisi, choreography by Gregory Maqoma and an array of stand-out vocalists and musicians. The production was first performed in London in 2018 its South African premiere was delayed by three years because of the COVID pandemic. It is a protean form and protean are the goals it pursues.One of his largest productions to date, The Head & The Load, tells the forgotten stories of Africans in World War 1, who served mostly as porters for European armies on the continent.
Glancing through so comprehensive a collection of works of art, we come to appreciate the poster can do simply anything, and do it in almost any medium-pencil or crayon, gouache or oil, photography, or sometimes a mingling of photography, painting, and decoupage. … commissioned for the purpose of announcing-and at the same time celebrating-events funded by Mobil in many fields of cultural activity… These posters have in common technical virtuosity of a lofty order and the ability to provoke a wide range of emotions, from merriment to sadness, giving us now the promise-filled faces of children, now the grimly resigned faces of men at war. “For nearly twenty years, Mobil has been a tireless patron of the art of poster design. When Mobil agreed to underwrite PBS programming in 1971, they launched not only an iconic era of TV, but an impressive poster repertoire as well. Mobil enlisted the top American designers of the time: Chermayeff & Geismar, Seymour Chwast, Paul Davis, Edward Gorey, Richard Mantel, Emanuel Schongut, and more-and they churned out consistently innovative and intoxicating designs that became the standard for poster advertising.
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