[El Anatsui: Studio Process]
The studio is located in the university town of Nsukka
in southeastern Nigeria.
It's about 10, 20 minutes, by walking, north of the university campus.
There are times when I come in unexpectedly,
and then I'll park my car elsewhere
and walk in and you hear a lot of...
There's a lot of, how do you call it now, banter. [LAUGHS]
Very loud banter.
When I go in, then they all keep quiet.
[LAUGHS]
Because I always demand that there should be absolute silence in there--
or as much silence as possible.
Because I try to impress upon them that a studio is a sacred place
that you come to do some bit of reflection and thinking.
For each new, say, pattern or texture that I'm introducing,
I have to show them how it's done,
because I find that, as an artist,
if you don't maintain physical contact with handling the material, for instance,
the work might end up not having a soul.
First of all, they have to do the units--
we call them "blocks"--
and a block can consist of maybe two hundred and something bottle caps together.
And so you take these units and then start playing around with them.
Then that's when you now have to lay all of them out,
scatter them in the studio,
and then start picking what you need for each portion of the work.
They put them together in a bunch
and you try to see what it can suggest.
If it's something that you feel is interesting,
or something effective,
then you have started a new idea.
You just play around--
play around, shift around,
and at times, for days, you can just keep shifting things around.
And taking photographs of them,
and putting them on the computer and...
So I have a lot of images on my computer.
In course of time, I could go back and just keep looking at this.
You need a very large bank of images--
of effects, of textures--
that I can always refer to,
and they could trigger off new ideas.
Because ideas do come at very unusual times.