against coronavirus from next week after uk regulators approved the pfizer and biontech vaccine in record quick time. speaking at downing street, prime minister boris johnson said it was a momentous moment. the united nations says 2020 is on course to be one of the hottest three years ever recorded. the un secretary general has told a special bbc climate programme that his key objective for next year is to reconcile humankind and nature. one of the most influential european politicians of the past half—century, the former president of france valery giscard d'estaing, has died at the age of 94. his family say he died of complications linked to covid—19. now on bbc news, in an interview recorded

in february 2020, zeinab badawi is in cape town with hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk with me, zeinab badawi, from south africa, where my guest has been described as one of the world's greatest living artists. he is william kentridge and this is a major exhibition of his work in cape town. william kentridge is versatile, hard—hitting and his talents span many different genres. but how has south africa's violent and racist past influenced his work as a white artist? william kentridge injohannesburg, welcome to hardtalk.

zeinab, thank you very much and welcome to the studio in johannesburg. you were born injohannesburg in 1955, the son of two prominent anti—apartheid lawyers, wow did growing up lawyers, how did growing up under apartheid affect you? i think because my parents were both very much aware of and involved in legal questions around the anti—apartheid struggle, from a young age i was aware of how unnatural south africa was. there was always a slight disjunction between myself and say, other people in the class whose parents took it as a natural... remember all white school, all white children, assumed that apartheid was part of the natural order. so, from a very young age, both in terms of things that were said at the dinner table, and in terms of the people who came to the house, i was aware of the unnaturalness of south african society. your parents were very anti—apartheid although they weren't members of the anc but they represented people like nelson mandela,

desmond tutu, one would have expected you to perhaps have followed in their footsteps because you did after all study african studies and politics. i think there is a strange relationship between my parents being lawyers and me being an artist. that was a sense of needing to find a way of finding my own opinion that would be impervious to a parent's cross—examination. it needed to be a way of making knowledge in the world that was not the same as the linear, logic of the law. i think it's partly as a... every child having to find a defence against the power of parents and for me, it was through becoming an artist. i only realised this years and years and months of therapy later to understand what that connection was, but i'm sure it's there. what is the connection and because obviously, you went on to become an artist and politics became a very central theme of your work,

is that how you married the two influences? i think it is and the larger question about my parents about what is the nature of the society and what is the nature of justice. they are questions that interest me enormously. i suppose as a young child, you have to, not as a young child but as an adolescent, you have to find a route to find your own voice. and if it was going to be in the terms of law and legal thinking, i was on a fast track to nothing. i was never going to be as smart or as sharp as either of my parents in that field. have you kept that with you because it is rather odd, here you are this internationally renowned artist but you said you ended up as an artist, it was what i was reduced to. you can always do a biography in which you describe how you are rescued by yourfailures. for example, i tried to be an oil painter, painting oil on canvas which is the way an artist was meant to be when i was growing up and i failed at that, i was really bad at it.

then i thought for a while i would become an actor and i went to acting school and i failed as an actor. if i'd failed less badly, i may have been a mediocre actor for the rest of my life and wondered why i never got decent roles and i failed at that. and i tried to be a filmmaker and ifound i couldn't manage that and what was left was to go back to being an artist. and of course then later on, the filmmaking and theatre and the political studies university, all of those feed and fed into the work that is done now. after you left university, you then studied art at a private art school and as you've just outlined, you really were very active across a whole number of mediums. your friend said to you, ‘look, william, do one thing and do it well‘. but you didn't take that advice did you? i tried to take it so well. you tried to be a bit of a jack of all trades. i tried it very well, thinking that was the conventional wisdom. do one thing and do it well.

if you're doing drawing, just do drawings. i gave up drawing. i tried to do theatre, only theatre. when i came back from the studies and i was working in the studio, i found that in spite of myself, i was still interested in theatre and the drawings becoming films and only later did i understand that this cross pollination, this bastard form of partly drawing, partly theatre, mixing with music, was by far the richest way for any one of those forms. the drawings were better from being connected to theatre, the theatre was better from being connected to filmmaking. and you studied after you left south africa, you went to study mime and theatre in paris after you'd finished your studies here in south africa. you came back and then you fairly quickly established a name for your drawings and prints. but you really only hit the international stage as it were in 1989, when you devised this very original way of drawing with charcoal on paper and then erasing it

and redrawing it and filming and making into animated films. if you are drawing and you film it as it's being done frame by frame, the drawing comes into being but you can keep on the process of erasing and drawing and the drawing has a kind of movement. there were interesting combinations of this. one i think, temperamentally for me, it was interesting to find a way within artmaking to be able to show the world as process rather than fact. you can say, here's a table, do a drawing of a table, there is a table, there is a fact. but you can also say a table is one stage between going backwards, the planks, the sawmill, the tree, and going forward, the broken table, the fire, and ashes. with animation, you acknowledge that that table is one moment in a process of becoming. in terms of the world seeing the work, there was fortunate timing. as i started doing animated films in1989, 1990, that was a period when mandela was released from prison, the anc was unbanned

and over the next few years, suddenly people from all over the world, journalists, directors, museum people, came to see south africa which had been such a pariah nation for so many years. that was fortunate timing as well. the zeitgeist was with you. so, that's very much the unique technique that you developed butjust looking at the content which kind of infuses all of your work. you are very influenced by the dadaist movement which started during the first world war as a reaction to the horrors going on. it kind of has a satirical approach, doesn't it? it has a satirical approach but what dada had and the area i'm still interested in working with is more i would say the absurd. the absurd, not as the way it is understood in england as the foolish, the joke, the humorous, but the absurd as saying you take a logic

and if there is a crack in that logic and you follow it through to the nth degree, you get an absurdity in the world. inside of south africa, the way of understanding apartheid was as this absurd logic where people's futures and lives were designated by how curly their hair was, how dark their skin was, an absurdity deep in the heart of that logic but it is carried through to a murderous end. there is a way in which taking the absurd and the logic and twisting it is a way of naturalism also, an accurate way of describing parts of the world that are out of kilter. in 1989, you began a series of short films based on a property developer called soho eckstein who is a wealthy real estate developer and he becomes a civic benefactor, erects a statue, a monument, to the black south african worker from whom his wealth is derived and then

in the film, the statue moves. what we're trying to get over with that film, what was the message? —— what were you trying to. i think that it's very difficult to think what i was trying to convey. i think if i knew what i was trying to convey, the interest of the work disappears. i'm interested in the impulse and following the impulse and seeing what it becomes, and i think i'm interested in after the process rather than at the beginning of the process. as i say, it's a thinking in material, having trust in the material to reveal things to you that you already know, that you're not aware of. it's a way of bringing different elements of a fragmented world together. and so, the films were made without scripts or storyboards and that's important, that they start with an impulse or an image and the drawings and films expand backwards and forwards and then you discover what the question is. the most recent ones about the extraordinary phenomena of the

zama zama illegal miners that are working in many parts of the old abandoned gold mines around johannesburg in this area. trying to get bits of gold that they can sell. trying to get bits of gold. on the one hand, you have these enormous mechanical grabs that can grab 20 tonnes of earth and rock at the same time and a hundred metres away, we have someone sitting in a small, shallow hole with a hammer and a screwdriver literally chipping away at a rock, grinding the rock with a piece of concrete and an enamel bowl and panning it, mixing it with mercury and an old sock to get a tiny dot of gold which they will sell to a gold dealer which eventually goes into the commercial gold market. what is the message in the film that you gone from the massive gold production of an industrial level to this artisanal. .. it's a phenomenon and it's the way in which things are seen in south africa

which i think will be a pattern in other parts of the world also. and that is when a huge industrial edifice, the gold mining industry in south africa, starts to collapse and the gold mining, the people employed by the gold mines go from many many hundreds of thousands to less than 100,000. there are many tens of thousands of people who are out of work, looking for a way of making a living and have no place in a formal economy, will not be employed in a formal economy and have to make the informal economy work. the formal economy ends up being subsidised by the informal economy in recycling of plastics and garbage, in the strange activity of this artisan and at the moment, illegal mining. because it is illegal, there is enormous criminality of gangs controlling... people have to look to themselves to feed themselves because the system is failing them. it's extraordinary because you have trade unions in the mines

for more than 30 years working to improve safety regulations and controls and leave and then the unofficial people come in and are underground for six weeks at a time and have to pay protection money for food to come down. it is an extraordinary disjunction. that fuels in a way the key transformations happening in south africa at the moment. the art magazine frieze said way back in 1988 said way back in 1998, that all the narratives in your films can be seen to plough three distinct themes, the post—apartheid, post—holocaust and postcolonial because you come from a family descended from lithuanianjews who went to south africa. is that a fair comment? that is a fair comment because the films are very unstructured, it is up to the audience to construct a possible narrative between the elements there. it's a mixture of the

associations people bring to the films and what is there. for example, there was one drawing i had which in my head, it was a soft curtain around a hospital bed and one person came up to me and said "i love the fact that you have drawn my squatters shack with the corrugated iron around where the person is lying." with the mining one, there are photographs of people under showers, masses of men showering before coming back from the mines. is that redolent of what tragically happened in auschwitz? it is but i was drawing a mine, people showering in a mine based on research i did on the mine. when you see a group of people standing under showers, all those other associations and so soho actually wears a pinstripe suit because the charcoal is quite crude and the lines are quite thick, some people read those suits as being echoes of the striped pyjamas of the concentration camps. it was never in my head,

but that's not to say that association could not be there. i'm also always interested in the different ways the work is read and some things echo for me and some things echo less. the question of colonialism, some thinking that finished the 19605 with the independence of african countries, it is clear that while the legacy of apartheid is still where we are, the aftermath of colonialism continues and the paradoxes and contradictions of that are still so central in south african and all african life. like for example? what do you mean? the piece i've most recently done is about africa in the first world war. and there was a debate, there was a strong conflict between african leaders at the time, saying, "do we say we demand the right to fight in this war to show we are the equal of white soldiers fighting this and we will be taken seriously, and after the war will be given equal human — equal civic rights to the french soldiers because we're fighting with them in the trenches?" which they weren't.

or, at the same time, there were other leaders saying, "no, this is a... let the the frenchmen and the germans and the bankers and the shopkeepers go and kill each other. it's got nothing to do with us." so, that sense of pull and push, of wanting to and not wanting to be part. of saying, "are we part of the..." or do we say, "no, this is the outside world has done to us, let us reject it." that's a complication which is very much of our era. how does that complication, in a sense, affect you? there you are, a member of the white community... privileged community... ..privileged community in south africa, and yet, as we said, yourfamily were very keen opponents of apartheid, and you are and so on and so forth. do you feel guilt on the one hand that you are the beneficiary of white privilege? does yourjewishness have a role to play? one of the things about white guilt, let it be said, is how rare it is for people who really feel badly in themselves about what happened. there are remarkable people who

are tortured by the sense of... there's a sense of responsibility for it, but i think there's a... for me, there's a sense of responsibility to the community in which i work, which is the community of artists, actors, performers... and you're very aware... but yourjewishness is significant, isn't it? let me tell you, judy hecker, who cocreated one of your exhibitions at the museum of modern art in new york about a decade ago, said, "there's no question william kentridge is influenced by hisjewishness. the notion of the oppressed and the oppressor — the holocaust must have something to do with that." is that right? i think that there was... within the anti—apartheid struggle in south africa, there was always overrepresentation numerically of jews involved both in the leadership and in the struggle in a broader away. there were also manyjews that made a lot of money and did very well out of the apartheid system.

it was both things. but there was a large number, and i think that partly that must have come from... not so much firsthand in south africa but familial knowledge of what happened in germany and eastern europe both beforejews came to south africa in the end of the 19th century, escaping pogroms in tsarist russia, and then what happened in central europe in the middle part of the last century. i'm sure that's part of the reason why there's a sense of acknowledgement of the vulnerability of a victim, of people who are under the sway of power around them. so, yourjewishness does help you understand the psyche of the black south african and how they suffered after the apartheid system? i think not to understand the psyche, but it helps me sympathise. and yet, william kentridge, here we are talking about how the situation in south africa, apartheid, how the holocaust has influenced your work, but you have said, "i am only an artist. myjob is to make drawings,

not to make sense." surely your art does make sense? your art can make sense but it makes sense from the position that it does not have to, it does not start with saying, "this is the essay." so many art schools and things, they first write the essay about what the meaning is and then find out how to express it and then execute and then itjust becomes an illustration of the idea. if you have confidence in the work and confidence in all the layers of thinking and knowledge and experience you have, you have to believe that through this rather stupid process, this dumb process of drawing, of cutting, of tearing, a meaning will emerge, and that at the end the work will not be without meaning and will have a sense. i think the studio has to be a very safe space for uncertainty, for doubt and for stupidity. but when you work as an opera director, you've directed operas, most recently at the met and so on, that's a very different kind of

discipline for you, isn't it? because you're already working with a known body of work? for every opera there has to be a theme, opera i'm interested in — the instability of objects of desire in lulu, the premonition of the first world war in wozzeck, the terror of hierarchy in the nose. these are larger things... but the primary activity of making the opera are the months in the studio here doing the drawings and preparing the projections and finding the language. once you actually get into rehearsal, yes, you have the specific libretto and the specific music, and that is a constraint, but the... and it's also a pleasure. i mean, there's nothing nicer than being in the rehearsal room with these astonishing voices close—up singing that music. and a central theme in your work is to follow the less good idea, and in fact you've set up the centre for the less good idea to help young artists in south africa, black artists obviously,

what do you mean by "follow the less good idea"? how does that feed into this centre? the principle of it, and it comes from the way i've worked in theatre productions, is bringing many different artists, actors, choreographers, filmmakers together to work on it. the principle being that you start with an idea, you start with an impulse, you don't start with randomness, but when you follow that idea and you start making the drawing, when you start rehearsing with actors, when you start working with musicians, there are odd things you see at the edges of that process. an improvisation at the end of the part you'd been carefully rehearsing that suddenly catches you and you recognise something in them that holds you, and you can start to actually pull that into the centre, and what's in the periphery can come into the centre. in fact, you discover these peripheral ideas can be central ideas. and i think it also, for me, has a political implication. when the huge political ideas of the world — communism, the end of history,

unfettered capitalism, we see the calamitous results of those grand ideas, of those certainties. with things politically, one also has to hope for things that emerge in a much more organic, smaller way from the edges as a way of thinking about problems. but bronwyn lace, one of the centre's organisers, says, "in order to qualify for grants and public funding, artists must prove positive impact of their art and incorporate a community—based outreach programme of some kind." yes, so that's not us. that's not what we do. that's what you do if you're looking for public funding, you have to show this drawing will reduce mother—to—child transmission... she's one of the organisers of your centre. she's saying that's the way public funding works. you don't approve of that? no, that's not what we do. that's the point — you're not going to get the support unless you do that? we will have to get it in different ways, because the whole point is to say, "yes, that's one way of working."

but for all the artists involved in that, you have the chance to say, "this is the impulse i have, this is a question i want to invoke, i can't prove an instrumental good that is going to... i've got a poem about the state of the nation, and the soundtrack goes with it and chaos of what it is to be a young black woman in south africa at the moment..." it's putting the cart before the horse. and this is a platform in which that can be... fundamentally we believe all these activities are vital for how a society understands itself, but to reduce them to the quantifiable instrumental good is to weaken them from the beginning, and to stop the impulse of the actors, the artists and the singers. finally, you're one of four children, your three siblings all left south africa, you were the only one who remained. your two children are here. what's your take on johannesburg, south africa ? where is it at?

i think it is... sometimes i would say i'm cautiously pessimistic, but i think in south africa you cannot be either an optimist or a pessimist. to claim you're one or the other is to miss what is happening here. so, for every disastrous thing and bad decision that is happening, there are extraordinary impulses and projects beginning. but to say, "oh, there are these great projects and extraordinary energy and good will that still exists after so little has changed for so many people in south africa," to only see that and not see the damage done also is also crazy. it's not to say you're sitting on a fence, it's to understand there is not a fence — there are two parallel paths unfolding of a future, and to be aware of the country in its fullest way, you have to be aware of the two different paths at the same time. william kentridge, thank you very much indeed for coming on hardtalk. zeinab, thank you so much.

hello. we've a much colder snap of weather on the way for the next couple of days, so there's a much greater risk of some ice and some snow. snow from these showers in the north through the course of today, and even perhaps in this band of more persistent rain in the south just on the hills because we got that cold airjust nudging further southwards, hanging around through today, hanging around through tomorrow as well. and look at this strengthening wind that will accentuate the chill. so, yes, we do have warnings out at the moment, especially across the northern half of the country, and the snow mainly on the hills and you can get the details on those warnings from our website. the showers are falling as snow on the hills in the north,

but across scotland, even to lower levels with a slight covering. and here, with a widespread frost, northern england, northwards, a risk of ice. some treacherous conditions potentially further south, there could be some patchy frost and a little bit of snow in this system as well across the welsh mountains, perhaps the moors of the southwest. as it edges its way northwards and eastwards, perhaps bringing some snow into the midlands as well, the showers further north still falling as snow over the hills. this, as you can see, slowly migrates eastwards through the day, giving way to showery weather further west, some hail and thunder here. whilst for scotland and northern ireland, the showers perhaps becoming fewer, more confined to the coasts with more sunshine, but it's cold for all of us, accentuated by the strengthening wind around that area of low pressure. and then those weatherfronts spiral their way around the low pressure overnight, so an increased risk as we go through into the coming night of snow potentially across northern and eastern areas, and a more widespread frost with the surface is damp even in the south. there's a risk of some ice as well. so, quite a difficult

one on friday in terms of the details because we've got these weather systems spiralling around that area of low pressure. certainly, it's going to be cold. it'll be windier as well with a risk of gales for the west coast of scotland and also through the irish sea, and these bands of rain pushing their way gradually westwards with some snow potentially. the lower levels on the western flank, and look at the temperatures, they are quite low. in the heavier bursts, that snow level comes down as well, could even be a smattering further south as well. certainly lots to keep our eye on at the moment for our first widespread taste of winter. the weekend sees things drying a little bit, but it stays pretty chilly, as you can see. the warnings, as i say, are on the website.

this is bbc news — i'm mike embley — with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. britain is to roll out a mass vaccination campaign against coronavirus from next week after regulators approved a vaccine in record time. we consider the damage that this virus has done, it is a fantastic moment. an exasperated election official in georgia pleads with president trump to dial down the rhetoric against his collea g u es the rhetoric against his colleagues over the election results. the french president who oversaw sweeping social reform, valery giscard d'estaing, has died at the age of 94. and

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