Rumours: A Conversation Between Francis Alÿs and James Lingwood

Alÿs, Francis; Lingwood, James

doi:10.1007/978-1-137-12006-9_17

Cited by 2 publications

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“…The main film we were working on involved a small red Volkswagen going up and down the hill, responding to the rehearsal session of a band from Juchitán (Rehearsal I (El Ensayo) (1999)(2000)(2001)). And the other film was a striptease scene which was produced in a strip club in New York City a bit later (Rehearsal II (2001-2006). Both were about Latin America's relationship to the concept of production and the dogma of efficiency; they were recalling the Latin American scenario in which modernity is always postponed.…”

Section: IImentioning

confidence: 99%

Francis Alÿs. The Nature of the Game

2023

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In 1999, a short video of a solitary boy kicking an empty bottle up a hill in Mexico City became the first instalment of Children’s Games, a series of works by artist Francis Alÿs (b. Antwerp, 1959). The ongoing project, which now numbers around thirty-five works, has gradually given shape to an extensive collection of videos of children at play. For almost twenty years, Alÿs and his collaborators Félix Blume, Julien Devaux, and Rafael Ortega have been travelling around the world to document the distinctive ways in which children interact with each other and their physical environment. They have gone from remote villages in DR Congo, Afghanistan, Venezuela, and Nepal to the mountains of Switzerland and metropoles like Hong Kong and Paris, but have also visited the war-torn city of Mosul in Iraq, the border between Mexico and the United States, and the strait of Gibraltar that divides Africa and Europe. The resulting images are standing proof of the seriousness of play and of children’s stunning powers of resilience in the face of conflict. This volume provides a multidisciplinary perspective to the many layers of Children’s Games. It includes an interview with Francis Alÿs and Rafael Ortega, a series of essays by well-known scholars and art critics, curatorial statements, and a logbook related to the presentation of Children’s Games at the Venice Art Biennale of 2022.

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Section: IImentioning

confidence: 99%

Francis Alÿs. The Nature of the Game

2023

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2 The Green Line

Gieskes¹

2014

The Imagined and Real Jerusalem in Art and Architecture

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Jerusalem is one of the places where the personal concerns of artist Francis Alÿs (Antwerp, 1959) have coincided with local circumstances. Like many other artists in today's age of globalization and biennial culture, Alÿs travels the world like a nomad, creating his artworks-or 'interventions' , as he calls them-in response to the places he visits, often situations of societal and economic crisis or political impasse. Not infrequently, his interventions, in the artist's own words, 'hit a nerve' in the local community and beyond, usually when his own preoccupations 'meet' the situation he encounters with a fruitful 'clash' .1 The confrontation between Alÿs's narrative and Jerusalem, which took place on the fourth and fifth of June 2004, received the title The Green Line: Sometimes doing something poetic can become political, and sometimes doing something political can become poetic. For this piece, which has also been referred to as Walk through Jerusalem, Alÿs walked through what he has identified as the archetypal city of conflict with a pierced can of green paint in his hand, creating a line that traced his journey (Fig. 2.1).2 The artist's route roughly followed the section within Jerusalem of the armistice demarcation line that has separated the Israeli and Palestinian communities since the end of Israel's War of Independence in 1948: a contested border that was internationally ratified under UN supervision in 1949, and has therefore been dubbed 'the 1949 armistice line' , but lost official boundary status in 1967 (Fig. 2.2). Both concept and structure of The Green Line are markedly simple, yet the work evokes a complex network of associations, regarding the history, present, and future of Jerusalem as well as themes prevalent in much contemporary art, including Alÿs's own work. The work first and foremost inspires reflection on the contemporary status of the 1949 armistice line Alÿs partially traced 56 years after its institution in 1948. The line has been viewed both as an undesirable, arbitrary source of conflict and division and-contrarily-as a relatively

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Rumours: A Conversation Between Francis Alÿs and James Lingwood

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Francis Alÿs. The Nature of the Game

Francis Alÿs. The Nature of the Game

2 The Green Line

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