Inner Cities: William Kentridge and the Landscapes of Memory

Abstract

In her essay on William Kentridge, South African scholar and playwright Jane Taylor explores how the catastrophe of apartheid has written itself across the landscape of South Africa, seeking to obliterate traces of prior spatial and metaphysical logics. Drawing on a discursive range of ideas about memory, from neural mind maps to memory palaces; biology to biography; selfhood to spatialisation; psychology to philosophy, Taylor shifts her emphasis from the conceptual and metaphysical reflection on memory, identity and space to offer a close contextual discussion of Kentridge’s short animation film Other Faces (2011). Taylor analyses how Kentridge’s short film takes a small incident in contemporary Johannesburg and uses this as an ‘event’ that precipitates the self into a series of remembered associations, with the adult self invoking residues from an infantile set of relations. Taylor describes Kentridge’s creative and technical process of painstakingly editing images of charcoal illustrations inscribed and erased in sequence, leaving a ‘vapour trail [of] blurred trace remains’: a creative process that acts as an eloquent metaphor for memory’s processes of remembering and forgetting.