Sweetly Play the Dance, the South African artist’s acclaimed video installation, opens a year full of events.
September 22nd, 2020.By Imma Tralli
Dark shadows swirl brightly over the dissonant harmony of death. A procession of saints, displaced people, political protesters, priests, and dancing skeletons punctuates the tragic rhythm of the scene. At the same time, a brass band opens the funeral procession, ready for the party. These are some of the images from More Sweetly Play the Dance, the monumental video installation by South African artist William Kentridge (Johannesburg, 1955) that, until December 2, will celebrate the reopening and restoration of the historic spaces of the Arsenal of the ancient Maritime Republic of Amalfi.
The Arsenal, now the town’s museum and the only example dating back to 1000 still standing in the West, was used in the Middle Ages to build the Amalfi Republic’s trading ships. After renovation, it returns in its new guise as the keystone of Italian and international art history.
From death to life
As soon as you cross the threshold, forty meters of video projections on eight screens illustrate a procession of dispossessed people marching from right to left in a landscape drawn in charcoal by the artist. Ebola victims limping with IVs and prisoners in cages or desks all disappear, foreshadowing the grotesque triumph of death and the celebration of life in the apocalyptic twilight of the landscape in the background. Between the funeral flowers and the unrestrained fury of forms, a dancer with a rifle pirouettes lightly on her toes, thus closing the parade.
One joins in her macabre dance, and in the instant of the last turn, one finds oneself off the screen. William Kentridge, one of the best-known contemporary artists, is the author of the famous mural, Triumphs, and Laments, painted on Rome’s Tiber embankment. The artist’s stylistic trait is to combine different techniques, from drawing to engraving, shadow theater to animation, sculptures to tapestries, and large monumental installations.
The gap in social injustices
In the tragicomic ritual of More Sweetly Play the Dance, the South African artist intends to make us reflect on the social injustices of colonialism, apartheid, migration, contemporary civil strife, and capitalism by “shaking up and bringing to our attention instances that are not local but universal,” gallery owner and exhibition curator Lia Rumma tells us. In an exceptional balance between drama and burlesque, the irredeemable tension of inauspicious human destiny is plunged into darkness in a constant tension toward the light.
More Sweetly Play the Dance in Amalfi is conceptually reunited with the three exhibitions Marcello Rumma, an enlightened patron, publisher, and collector, and his wife Lia conceived and organized precisely at the Arsenali between 1966 and 1968. Emblematic was the exhibition event curated by Germano Celant Arte Povera più Azioni Povere in October 1968 that involved some of the most daring artists and intellectuals of the time, projecting the avant-garde experiments of Italian art into the international context.
A year of celebrations
Kentridge’s exhibition is part of the Amalfi Oltre project, which “intends to continue that cultural policy that had been interrupted after the Amalfi ’68 revolution,” the gallery owner says. Wanted by the Campania Region and promoted by Scabec as part of the Campania Culture Digitization Project for the Archives of the Contemporary, it aims to echo and revive the artistic and cultural ferment of an epic season for contemporary art history while celebrating the collector’s extraordinary vision.
“More Sweetly Play the Dance fits perfectly into a setting like the Arsenals. The staged dance is a medieval dance and is perfect in this Gothic cathedral represented by the Arsenals returned to their historical magnificence. They seem to have been born for each other,” Lia Rumma continues. As a witness and heir to the Amalfi ’68 period, “I thought of an artist like Kentridge for the Arsenals precisely because he would speak to the world. The Arsenals thus rediscover the value of culture and art as in the 1968 exhibition, considered one of the 100 most important exhibitions ever,” says Lia Rumma.
For William Kentridge, “the Arsenals represent an extraordinary place to celebrate the revolution of that epic season for art and the memory of Marcello Rumma. The energy of creation was transmitted from my studio in Amalfi.” With William Kentridge’s exhibition, Amalfi returns to a moment of extraordinary vibrancy, “a glorious moment, as glorious as the Ancient Republic of Amalfi had been,” Lia Rumma concludes.
The invitation is to look beyond the randomness of life and its tragicomic irreverence to be ready to evolve through the values of art and culture beyond the limit, beyond all boundaries.