William Kentridge's Lapis Lazuli: A Studio Meditation on Translation and Chaos
An excerpt from William Kentridge's forthcoming book 'A Natural History of the Studio' (2026, Grove Press) explores the role of language, translation, and creative process in his Johannesburg studio. Kentridge describes receiving a block of pure lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, which he used to paint texts and phrases on old book pages, treating them as contemporary rubrics. He reflects on the split self in the studio—the maker and the critic—and the productive incoherence that drives his work. The text traces the migration of images across media: from Alfred Jarry's Ubu to etchings, then to the theatre piece 'Ubu and the Truth Commission' (which used verbatim transcripts from South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission), and finally to a film, 'Ubu Tells the Truth'. Kentridge also discusses his film adaptations of Schubert's 'Winterreise' and Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, where meaning dissolves into questions of frame rate and colour intensity. He draws on neurology (periaqueductal grey as the seat of consciousness), the Markov blanket as a metaphor for the artist's boundary, and the Dadaist imperative to 'uncertain the word'. The excerpt ends with bronze glyphs—silhouettes given weight—as a counter to digital ephemerality.
Key facts
- Excerpt from William Kentridge's 'A Natural History of the Studio' (2026, Grove Press)
- Based on his 2024 Slade Lectures at the University of Oxford
- Kentridge received a block of pure lapis lazuli from Afghanistan
- He paints texts on pages of 18th-century religious books and 19th-century stargazing records from Cape Town
- The studio in Johannesburg is 42 paces in a figure eight
- His London flat studio during COVID quarantine is a small room
- Kentridge's 'Ubu and the Truth Commission' used verbatim transcripts from South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission
- The play combined Jarry's Ubu with archival footage of apartheid-era violence
- Kentridge created 24 films to accompany Schubert's 'Winterreise'
- He references Roland Barthes on the 'grain of the song'
- Kentridge grew up hearing Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau sing Winterreise
- He was surrounded by isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho, Sepedi, Setswana in Johannesburg
- The excerpt references Svetlana Alexievich's book on the Soviet war in Afghanistan
- Kentridge creates bronze glyphs from silhouettes of objects like phones and megaphones
- He cites the Dadaists in Zurich in 1916 as a model for destabilizing language
- The book is published by Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic
Entities
Artists
- William Kentridge
- Alfred Jarry
- Kurt Schwitters
- Rainer Maria Rilke
- Walter Benjamin
- Sigmund Freud
- Roland Barthes
- Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
- Gerald Moore
- Czesław Miłosz
- Svetlana Alexievich
- James Joyce
- William Shakespeare
- Franz Schubert
Institutions
- Grove Press
- Grove Atlantic
- University of Oxford
- Truth and Reconciliation Commission (South Africa)
Locations
- Johannesburg
- South Africa
- London
- United Kingdom
- Cape Town
- Afghanistan
- Zurich
- Switzerland
- Hampstead
- Maresfield Gardens