Francis Alys
Francis Alys
Francis Alÿsis 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...
NationalityBelgian
ProfessionArtist
CountryBelgium
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.
What I can't tell with a photo I will tell with a painting, and what I can't tell with a painting I will tell with a video or text sometimes, et cetera.
Formulating the proposal is about 80% of the actual time of the process. In the end, the time spent filming, editing and postproduction is a very small proportion of the total time you spend in the production of the film.
I have no problem twisting the facts if it's the only way I can be true to the moment.
I am always fascinated by the way kids create their own world. That is something I am very attentive to anywhere I go.
Can that make any sense - a Belgian artist living in Mexico and working in Afghanistan?
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.