Belgian artist Francis Alys is a conceptual and performance artist, blending contributions from other multiple disciplines such as video, photography, drawing and painting. He has lived and worked in Mexico City since 1985. His influences are many including literary authors Augusto Monterroso, Franz Kafka, photographer/critic Susan Sontag, artists Matta-Clark, Bruce Nauman, Philip Guston. His performances included elements of socially engaged art that evokes emotions of the absurd, the impossible, of physical endurance and danger by placing himself in situations—“how far can I go?” But within these artistic elements there is a sense of insight, humor, and empathy in subject matter.
When Faith Moves Mountains, Lima Peru 2002
"We achieved the moment of the utmost social sublime, a collective emotion." The act started as something absurd and impossible, but instilling into the volunteers a sense of being able accomplish anything against great odds.
Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Doing Something Leads to
Nothing) Mexico City 1997
Alys pushes a block of ice out on the streets of Mexico City all
day until it melts into a puddle.
"Perhaps my goal has always been to strip down my
scenarios to a few words only, so they can be liberated from the burden of
documentation, of its physical weight. The temporality of “making something” – we are
aware of how lengthy the process must be, of melting a huge and heavy
block of ice. It is this temporary relationship with the object being made, the physical and emotion, and the relationship to the environment--streets of Mexico City and the pedestrians who are the witnesses, that defines Sometimes Doing Something Leads to
Nothing.
Game Over, Culiacan Sinaloa, Mexico 2011
"I ended up driving my old vocho from my
place in Mexico City to the Botanical Garden in Culiacán, about 750 miles away.
I was curious about the classic road-trip genre and had serious doubts about
the relevance of an artist intervening in a context as complex as Culiacán’s.
As we know, the place is riddled with conflict due to the narcos
there. So, I developed this rather absurd script for a road trip whose ending
was that once I got to the Botanical Garden I would crash the car into a tree.
When we presented the piece to the people running the garden, who had
commissioned it, we said it dealt with empathy between nature and culture, or
something like that. The plan was for the car to remain in the site and devolve
into a sort of giant flowerpot for the garden’s flora and fauna, becoming
integrated with the local ecosystem."
Other videos by Francis Alys:
"Reel-Unreel", Kabul Afghanistan 2011
"Watercolor", the Red Sea, Aqaba Jordan, the Black Sea, Trabzon Turkey 2010
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