A post-structural reading of Drawings for Projection: deconstruction of time by Andreas Huyssen

Andreas Huyssen describes Kentridge works in terms of remembering and forgetting. He gives us an interesting analysis of Drawings for Projection, with the intent of making it resonate powerfully in global and local contexts.
Intimations of changing perceptions of time and space have provided me with a leitmotif: the shadow of memory darkening a mostly obvious present, site of violence and space of forgetting – by now this has all become central an ever-widening political and cultural discourse across the world, both in the arts and in the field of human rights.

In every short movie created by Kentridge, drawing-by-drawing, scene-by-scene, a film of moving images emerges from this stop-motion technique. Remembering and forgetting are constitutive elements of Kentridge’s practice of charcoal drawing.
Huyssen underlines the disruption of a linear timeline, deconstructed by Kentridge not only in his approach of talking about his personal way in order to see an historical event through his memories (see above), but even technically. Huyssen talks about how the shadow is the preserved trace of the erasure, a stain or barely a visible outline of bodies, buildings, objects that point to the respectively preceding version of the drawing. What remains in the movement of time is the trace.
The continuous metamorphosis of things, faces, and landscapes is the guiding principle in Kentridge progression of drawing. Erasure and wiping become the material manifestation of the structure of memory and so the personal way to experience and remember time. This action of erasing and rubbing out lines is the metaphor for the instability of historical memory.
Thus, according to Huyssen, the Drawings offer not only a self-reflection through the fascination bricolage of charcoal drawing and animation; they also reflect the structure of political memory itself, which is always subject to erasure, evasion and forgetting.  

“Synchronic images emerge which, as palimpsest in motion, carry their own diachronic negation along with them.”
There is a scene in History of the Main Complaint (1996) where Felix is driving his car at night through a thicket of ominous, very claustrophobic trees.  His eyes stare back at the audience in his car rear-view mirror. As he drives forward, memories of South Africa’s apartheid atrocities appear (electrodes that at first send electrical shocks across the car’s screen thread their way through to a Sunday roast, which in turn attach themselves firstly to a toe and then most horrifyingly to a penis and testicles. )
The reference to the Sunday roast is obvious: while most white South Africans enjoyed their Sunday family dinners, black South Africans were being tortured through well documented, heinous torture techniques).  The memories give way to the present, where a dead body appears lying inert next to the road Felix traverses.
Other individuals materialize as brutalized, trampled and kicked. As Felix lies in his coma, these attacks are chronicled on his body scan through the use of red pastel marks.  Almost subliminally fast, a dual windshield/medical scanner wipes them out. The projecting front car headlights illuminate his shocked face held momentarily in stasis before the car hits him. Then, there is a close-up of his face colliding with the windscreen the force of which crushes his face, and the startling image of the imploding windscreen. At that very second, Felix emerges from his coma. The implosion is not only one of bodies and hardware, but of time.
The past, represented by apartheid’s atrocities, collides with the present, the moment the car impacts with the person and the immediate present Felix awakens from his coma.  This traumatic collision of the past with the present results not only in an awakening of his physical being (coma) but also of his unconscious being, repressed images of occurrences that took place in his (and South Africa’s) past.