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We also need a peer group, colleagues we can collaborate with, discuss our work with. Most great leaps forward in culture, from Bauhaus to Brit pop, involve groups of people discussing, arguing, competing with and supporting each other, and pushing each other to innovate.
In 2002, Rolex devised and created a mentor scheme; Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, which takes young innovators from a wide range of creative fields, and puts them with more experienced mentors. It’s an on-going project run by a specialist team, in which they all – mentors and protégés – meet regularly, and work together in a variety of ways. Mentors have included Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Colm Tóibín and Alfonso Cuarón, each choosing a protégé to work with and with many of them coming together again every two years.
Artist
In 2013, López went to work alongside his mentor William Kentridge in his studio in South Africa. There’s a lovely short film of this, made by Rolex, which shows the older artist trying to get his protégé to loosen up a little, to free up his lines and work more roughly and spontaneously.
‘He was pushing me to the limit, and it was fun!’ says López now. ‘But the way you draw, it’s like your handwriting, right? It’s really hard to change. The way I draw is very geometrical, architectural. The way William works is about chaos, movement, whereas I’m more controlled.’
Nonetheless, Kentridge’s impact on him was so profound it took a couple of years to process. At a time when even getting avisa to travel was difficult for Colombians, López went to Africa, Europe and the US with his mentor. But mainly what he learnt, he says, was a new openness. As well as drawings, prints and films, Kentridge also works in theatre and opera, creating performance and collaborative works.
Some of his peers from the Rolex programme have become friends and collaborators, and he says he’s realised that as creatives, they share similar challenges, and can offer each other a great deal. He recently worked with Lebanese theatre director Maya Zbib and Australian dancer Lee Searle and was due to visit film-maker Annemarie Jacir’s cultural centre in Bethlehem when the coronavirus upended all of our plans.
López is in Bogotá when we speak via Zoom. He’s lived in New York since 2014, but in March his wife had planned a trip to Columbia, and he decided to go with her due to the unfolding pandemic. It’s August when we speak, but Columbia is still in lockdown, with all commercial flights grounded. So the couple had let go of their apartment in Brooklyn, putting their belongings into storage. They’re not sure if or when they will return.
‘It’s a completely uncertain situation,’ he says stoically. ‘But we’re fine. We have a place here in Bogotá, a home and studio, and I’ve been working – though isolated! I haven’t seen family or close friends.’
world is conversations.
What changes the world
is being with people you
admire and realising
things are possible’
What he’s discovered, in this strange time, is how much his work is influenced by his environment. In New York, he had been working with industrial, cutting-edge materials. In Columbia, he returned to more natural, organic materials, collaborating with skilled local artisans: a carpenter, a weaver, a bookbinder. ‘They’re desperate to work,’ he says. ‘Their shops have been closed for four months. So it’s been a very productive time.’
Time is also different in New York, he says. In Bogotá, he is surrounded by memories, by history, by politics, by the legacy of the guerrilla war that has caused conflict for most of his life. In New York, he’s unencumbered by this, and his focus shifted. ‘Somehow time changed when I was there and it was more about the future and the present.’
I ask if he ever procrastinates and he laughs. On slow days, he says, he tends to refocus by pacing around the studio, tidying up, hoping that ideas will come. ‘You’ll start organising photographs or books, and then you find a book that you always loved, and then you’re hooked into something, just like that.’
He also keeps boxes with leftover paper and card from making prototypes of his installations. ‘I try to recycle some of the materials I work with,’ he says. ‘So I’ll start playing with that – doing random collages or drawings, trying to make something. I enjoy that. And it’s very satisfying!’
Film-maker
‘It was really special to be able to be on a set, to be sitting next to him, listening in with the help of an interpreter. He works very differently to me. When he shows up in the morning, he walks through his set with the production designer, checking that everything is okay for the day, with a huge team around him. That was really eyeopening to me. I like to talk very privately with my teams and with my actors. He’s got everybody around him and he’s got this crew that moves with him.’
Yet Zhang Yimou chose Jacir because they had much in common. ‘I started in independent cinema,’ he told her. ‘And I saw somebody working the way I was working then. Without any resources, you were able to do something.’
Jacir is Palestinian, which tends to complicate matters further. She is used to working around checkpoints, permit problems, having a key actor suddenly denied access to the set. As well as the daily restrictions and humiliations that many Palestinians face.
‘I get very upset about it. People say I need to let it go. But I won’t just accept it. It gets harder, as I get older. Because I don’t want to behave like it’s normal.’
We’re talking via Zoom, as is the way now. She admires the colours in my study in Kent; I like the clean white lines and lush plants in the Bethlehem apartment she shares with her husband – also a filmmaker – and their four-year-old daughter.
When asked how her pandemic experience has been, she laughs and says longer than most. She was at the Berlin Film Festival, and had isolated for the required 14 days on her return, on March 1st. Two weeks later, Palestine went into full lockdown and when we spoke in August, life was still restricted.
Still, she has worked on three experimental shorts she’s calling ‘Coronafilms’. Her next feature will be partly filmed in the UK, with British as well as Palestinian actors, and should be her biggest production to date. She did work on it, she says, although not as much as she would have liked. She is also a director of a cultural space in Bethlehem, Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir, which she co-founded with her sister and when all of their 2020 programming was cancelled, they decided to take it online.
years, officially. But
between that we’re
always sharing what’s
going on and that’s
hugely inspiring’
Normally, she loves the writing process, though when I ask how she procrastinates, there’s no hesitation. ‘Eating!’ she declares, along with getting over-involved in research. ‘I find something that takes me to something else and then something else. And suddenly five hours have gone by.’
A film shoot requires a completely different kind of focus, she adds. ‘On set, there’s so much going on. How do you keep your focus when there’s 100 things happening at once and you need to know about all of them?
‘When I made my first feature, Salt of This Sea [2008], a producer told me, “You’re like a top spinning, spinning, spinning. You need to calm down.” And she was right, because I always had a pain in my stomach, which is where I hold stress. I wasn’t sleeping, I wasn’t eating properly – because I was so afraid that things weren’t going well. Now, it’s different. I’m not always calm in life. But on my set, I’m very calm. I know now that you can’t micromanage. You have to bring in people you trust, then let them do their job.’
‘You just have to act,’ she says. ‘If it works, it works. And if it doesn’t, you find an alternative. The key is not to overthink and stress. If something blocks you, then find a way around it. But if you try to prepare for all the things that might go wrong, it’s too overwhelming.’
Support is important to Jacir. She now mentors young film-makers and artists. She has made her film crew into a family, working with the same people repeatedly. And she surrounds herself with other creatives, including some from the Rolex scheme, who have become close friends and collaborators.
‘We meet every two years, officially. But between that there’s a lot of other meetings, we’re always sharing what’s going on, and that’s hugely inspiring. It’s really helped me, as an artist. And it’s not about just talking about art, it’s talking about life.’
Jacir’s latest film Wajib is a warm, funny, very human tale about a stylish Milan-based architect who returns to Nazareth to help his more traditional father deliver invitations to his sister’s wedding. It’s on most streaming services now. dsarjacir.com
Theatre-maker
That week, I had been due to interview Maya Zbib, the Beirut-based theatre-maker mentored in the Rolex scheme by radical theatre/opera director Peter Sellars. One of the things I’ve always loved about my job is you’ll be asked to interview someone you don’t know, and in the process of researching, you come to admire them. Maya Zbib is brilliant and bold, and believes theatre is a weapon. Her husband is part of her Zoukak Theatre Company, and they have a two-year-old daughter. We’ve never met, but I can’t sleep for thinking about them. A tragedy that has affected a whole city becomes more real, to me, because I’ve come to know about just one of its residents.
It is days before I’m told she is definitely alive, more than a week before we speak, over a crackly phone line. She sounds like she’s still in shock.
The office of their small theatre space was very dark when they moved in, so they’d had a glass wall installed, to bring in the light. Her husband had been in the office on the day of the explosion, along with many of the team. But they’d left about 10 minutes before the glass completely shattered in the explosion. They were lucky, she says. So many people lost everything.
She’s already starting to focus on the future. ‘Our theatre isn’t completely destroyed. It’s minor, really. So we’ll see
if there are funds for restoration. We will apply. For the next three years at least, we will stay here because we don’t want to leave in haste. We’ve built so much, here, with the company.’
She is used to working in challenging circumstances. As well as performing in theatres around the world, Zoukak has worked in refugee camps, in the street, in rural areas where people mostly gather for weddings and funerals, not for plays.
‘When we’re working in contexts that are not equipped for theatre, it’s more about having a conversation with people through the medium of theatre. It’s about getting a message through, rather than the audience experiencing high art, about creating an emotional situation or an experience.
‘It’s difficult. Last time we toured villages, it was just after I’d given birth. Taking my daughter with me was so stressful. Sometimes no one understands what you’re doing, they’re talking all the way through. I was crying after one performance, “I’m not doing this anymore. It’s too much!”’
But then they met a 10-year-old who’d been told he couldn’t go to the performance but watched it anyway, hidden behind a tree. It was a version of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, adapted to reflect Lebanon’s political situation. ‘He’d understood all these quite intricate dramaturgical decisions, because he didn’t come with any prejudice. I found that so inspiring from a kid who had never seen any theatre.’
This is what she means, when she says that theatre is a weapon. She has seen it change people, whether she’s doing workshops in American universities or creating street theatre in Lebanon to campaign against domestic violence. Most of all, she says, it has changed her. ‘Theatre has allowed me to find myself, to understand my surroundings, my family. It makes me a better person. You have to listen to others, to know what they need, to translate your ideas so people understand you. You have to be in physical proximity, look people in the eye. You have to work from integrity. And you’re always questioning things.’
Her relationship with her mentor, Peter Sellars, has served to reinforce that. ‘It was an honour for me just watching Peter. How he exists as a person and how he relates to the world. It made me believe even more that theatre is a way of life. It’s not about doing something, it’s about being. From my mother to little children on the street here, to high society people at the Lyric Opera House [in Chicago], the way he deals with people and the way he navigates life, as an artist, was inspirational for me.’
Rolex Mentors and Protégés for 2020-2021 American film maker Spike Lee chose Kyle Bell, 33, USA; British director Phyllida Lloyd chose Whitney White, 33, USA; American artist Carrie Mae Weems chose Camila Rodríguez Triana, 34, Colombia; Composer, lyricist and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda chose Agustina San Martin, 28, Argentina rolex.org/rolex-mentor-protege/newmentors-2020
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Sheryl Garratt is a writer, and a coach working with creatives. You can find her at thecreativelife.net