Forum Südliches Afrika, 20. März 2025: Finding the Less Good Idea

“E a re ngaka kgolo go retelelwa, go alafe ngakana.”
“If the good doctor can’t cure you, find the less good doctor.”

This Setswana proverb goes a long way to describing the creative impulse at The Centre for the Less Good Idea. Secondary pursuits, collective and collaborative, multidisciplinary artistic process and practice – to this we give our focus, attention, energy and resources. This talk will share the the journey from early 2016, when William Kentridge and Bronwyn Lace began a conversation and ended up founding The Centre for the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg.

 The Centre has gathered momentum and by 2024 has become a formative space for art projects in South Africa and beyond. In eight years over 500 individual performances, films and installations have been newly created and shown, and more than 1000 artists of all disciplines have worked on unique projects within the spaces. The Centre engages communities of artists from South Africa, Africa and more recently across the world

Bronwyn Lace is a visual artist who has collaborated with William Kentridge on the founding and establishing of The Centre for the Less Good Idea. For Botswana-born Lace, who currently works between Austria and South Africa, her artistic practice is concerned with the relationship between art and other fields such as physics, literature, philosophy, museum practice, education and more.