ART CITIES:Amsterdam-Francis Alÿs
Born in Belgium in 1959, Francis Alÿs trained as an architect in his home country and in Venice. In 1986 he moved to Mexico City, where he started to focus on visual art. On his many walks through the city, he started to study and record everyday life in and around the Mexican capital by means of simple yet striking performative actions.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Eye Filmmuseum Archive
We all know the role of children’s games in mirroring the symbols and structures of their era. They operate as surreptitious historical communicating vessels: a means whereby an atemporal vocabulary passes from one generation to the next, crossing continents and civilisations despite the violence of colonial and modern transformations. Ancient rituals survive, at times, within childish rules and rhymes that, if more closely looked at, contain whole bygone worldviews and poetic modes of thinking. A big spatial installation at Eye Filmmuseum provides the setting for Francis Alÿs’ impressive series “Children’s Games”. World-renowned for his body of work at the crossroads of the political and poetic, disrupting our perceptions of the world, Alÿs is interested in everyday gestures and the political and symbolic potential that they contain. Ongoing since 1999 and now comprising 18 videos, “Children’s Games” show scenes of children at play around the world. This inventory of childhood activities offers a fresh perspective on real-life moments that are both banal and remarkable. Through the sparkling imagination of children, Alÿs presents an intimate yet political view of the universal and unifying nature of games. The images he has captured in Mexico, Afghanistan, Nepal, Belgium, Iraq, Venezuela, France, Morocco and Jordan show how children turn simple, ordinary things (chairs, coins, sand, stones, plastic bottles) into the foundation of unlikely and fantastical universes. Transformed by imagination and a fraternal spirit that is both tacit and spontaneous, these objects lose their usual prosaicness to find new symbolic potential. With each gesture, the children reinvent the world, the tensions that organize it and the converging forces that travel through it. Watching the videos is an extraordinary and profoundly touching experience, one which brings back the sensations typical of childhood, and reminds us of the simplicity and imagination that transformed us, at some point, into the architects of the world (in the same way that the act of drawing can). A game becomes a sophisticated reflection of the reality of the children who, through their play, allow time to pass with an enviable lightness. Francis Alÿs’s work involves making subtle interventions in daily life, and then capturing the effect with the help of video, photography, drawings and paintings. For example, Alÿs pulled a toy dog made of magnetic iron through the city, gathering all sorts of metal from the streets in the process, and he walked with a leaking tin of green paint along the Green Line, which in 1948 marked the border between Israel and Jordan. He also pushed a block of ice for nine hours through Mexico City until it had melted. Later in his career, Alÿs travelled as an ‘embedded war artist’ to Afghanistan, and since 2016 he has spent extended periods in Iraq, where he accompanies a Kurdish battalion and stays in refugee camps. Alÿs won the Eye Art & Film Prize (2018) for his work.
Info: Eye Filmmuseum Amsterdam, IJpromenade 1, Amsterdam, Duration: 19/12/19-8/3/20, Days & Hours: sun-Thu 10:00-22:00, Fri-Sat 10:00-23:00, www.eyefilm.nl
