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[El Anatsui: Studio Process]

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The studio is located in the university town
of Nsukka

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in southeastern Nigeria.

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It's about 10, 20 minutes, by walking,
north of the university campus.

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There are times when I come in unexpectedly,

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and then I'll park my car elsewhere

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and walk in and you hear a lot of...

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There's a lot of, how do you call it now,
banter. [LAUGHS]

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Very loud banter.

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When I go in, then they all keep quiet.

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[LAUGHS]

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Because I always demand that there should
be absolute silence in there--

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or as much silence as possible.

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Because I try to impress upon them that
a studio is a sacred place

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that you come to do some bit of reflection
and thinking.

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For each new, say, pattern or texture that
I'm introducing,

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I have to show them how it's done,

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because I find that, as an artist,

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if you don't maintain physical contact with
handling the material, for instance,

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the work might end up not having a soul.

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First of all, they have to do the units--

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we call them "blocks"--

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and a block can consist of maybe
two hundred and something bottle caps together.

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And so you take these units
and then start playing around with them.

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Then that's when you now have to
lay all of them out,

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scatter them in the studio,

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and then start picking what you need
for each portion of the work.

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They put them together in a bunch

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and you try to see what it can suggest.

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If it's something that you feel is interesting,

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or something effective,

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then you have started a new idea.

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You just play around--

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play around, shift around,

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and at times, for days,
you can just keep shifting things around.

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And taking photographs of them,

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and putting them on the computer and...

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So I have a lot of images on my computer.

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In course of time, I could go back
and just keep looking at this.

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You need a very large bank of images--

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of effects, of textures--

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that I can always refer to,

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and they could trigger off new ideas.

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Because ideas do come at very unusual times.