Francis Alys Quotes

Francis Alys — Belgian Artist

Francis Alÿs is a Belgian-born, Mexico-based artist. His work emerges in the interdisciplinary space of art, architecture, and social practice. After leaving behind his formal training as an architect and relocated to Mexico City, he has created a diverse body of artwork that explores urbanity, spatial justice, and land-based poetics. Employing a broad range of media from painting to performance, his works examine the tension between politics and poetics, individual action and impotence. Alÿs commonly enacts paseos—walks that resist the subjection of common space. Alys reconfigures time to the speed of a stroll, making reference to the figure of the flâneur, originating from the work of Charles Baudelaire and developed by Walter Benjamin. Cyclical repetition and return also inform the character of Alÿs’ movements and mythology—Alÿs contrasts geological and technological time through land-based and social practice that examine individual memory and collective mythology. Alÿs frequently engages rumor as a central theme in his practice, disseminating ephemeral, practice-based works through word-of-mouth and storytelling... (wikipedia)

We've lost control of this planet somewhere. There's an echo in that kind of tornado situation, where you're powerless facing those phenomena.

In the eye of the tornado, there's no more high and low, no floor and sky.

Can that make any sense - a Belgian artist living in Mexico and working in Afghanistan?

I am interested in seeing how a certain situation can develop with potential accidents. First, I am inspired by the acts of potential collaborators. It tends to be an action they have already done in a different context. I am very clear about the rules of the game, but once it's launched, I don't intervene at all.

I have no problem twisting the facts if it's the only way I can be true to the moment.

Francis Alys Quotes

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