AfricaIs aCountry

Anything is Possible for Kentridge

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Anything is Possible for Kentridge

By
Tom Devriendt

If you haven’t seen this documentary (trailer above) on South African artist William Kentridge yet, take your time for it. William Kentridge: Anything is Possible is the first in a series of Art21-produced features focusing on contemporary art and artists. Kentridge, as always, captures the essence of recent and less recent times: “This extraordinary nonsense hierarchy (we had in South Africa) made one understand the absurd not as a peripheral mistake at the edge of a society but as a central point of construction, so that the absurd for me is always a species of realism rather than a species of joke or fun.”

You can watch the documentary in its entirety here.

– Tom Devriendt

Further Reading

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.