Floating World – The Long Minute

2020
Made in response to a personal invitation by William Kentridge’s “Centre For The Less Good Idea’ to make a 55sec film for their IG platform. It was one of several artist short films aired under the project title ‘The Long Minute’.

My work has always involved an immersion in nature, a sense of awe and the sublime and a preoccupation with the nature of time. I grew up, and have lived most of my adult life, in Johannesburg where the sublime arrives in the form of cloud formations that pile up daily. Change is ubiquitous as evidenced in this natural process of transformation and dissolution. Time (as Aristotle suggested) is the measurement of change, not of being, but of becoming, made up of events, processes, chaos and entropy.

In Floating World I wanted to diarise my everyday and the transience of each passing moment. I live in my childhood home on a hill above a vast veld with a view of the city and the extensive highveld sky. The overcast sky can be read as a metaphor for troubled times, but there are glimpses of blue, of hope. I asked violinist Waldo Alexander if he would respond to my film with Tom Waits’ Fawn in mind. The orchestration is as mezmerizing as the clouds. The quiet slow, haunting pace is beautifully contrasted by the swift, turbulent motion of the clouds.