This book is a collection of Spanish poems which I have translated into English to the best of my ability. Raised speaking both English and Spanish at home, the gaps in my vocabulary are revealed as I attempt to decipher these artistic passages. Even with a perfectly fluent translator, these forms of communication can never be paired bijectively. This book then alludes to all the poetry that has been inevitably lost in translation.
Mama is a video about my mother, who has Parkinson’s disease. Here she is depicted in her usually daily activities at home. This video explores my relationship to the condition as it manifests through the body of my mother.
Since we will perform our party art piece at our Bowling Party, Alex and I had to do some research on the location of our piece. So, Alex and I went bowling!
We looked around area and found key features of the Bowling Alley that we can keep in mind when preparing our piece. For example, we made note that we can:
The Average Point of Interest in San Francisco is a piece Lee Walton made where he took the mathematical average of all 287 points of interest according to the Official Visitor’s Map of San Francisco. Using the map coordinates of each point, he found that this “average point of interest” is located on Flint Street off 15th avenue near Corona Heights.
Francis Alÿs is a Mexico-based artist who’s work encompasses a variety of media, often performances that are documented by video, photography, writing, painting, and animation. His work is described as poetic and political, as he often examines the social, cultural, and political conditions of the land.
Francis Alÿs often performs various kinds of walks. An early walk of his includes “Cuentos patrióticos” or Patriotic Tales in 1997. This black and white video documents the artist’s re-enactment of a historical moment in Mexico’s political history. The video shows Alÿs leading a flock of sheep in single file around the flagstaff in the middle of the Zócalo, the ceremonial square at the heart of Mexico City, and the centre for urban activities and political rallies. Occasionally, a sheep joins the group, and the others adjust themselves within the circle to maintain its shape. The action mirrors an event in 1968, when civil servants were forced to congregate in the Zócalo to welcome the new government, yet bleated like sheep to mark their protest.
SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POETIC CAN BECOME POLITICAL
and
SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POLITICAL CAN BECOME POETIC
Another politically charged walk is “The Green Line“, where Francis Alÿs walks the Armistice border in Jerusalem carrying a leaking can of green paint that trails a line behind him as he walks. The title of the work, and the green line itself, are references to the historic Green Line that was agreed upon in 1949 as the boundary between Israeli and Palestinian land at the end of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. After the war had resulted in a clear win for Israel, the Israeli state was established and a green line was literally drawn out on a map to demarcate its borders with Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Lebanon during the Armistice Agreements
His walks are often location based and can be simply about the city. In a well known piece titled “Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing“, Alÿs pushes a large block of ice around Mexico City for over 9 hours until it melts away. The piece transforms into a way of getting to know the city from a different perspective.
Similarly, inn “Samples II”, Alÿs walks around London, England with a drum stick in his hand, playing the sounds of metal fences beside him.
These two walks also reference another theme of his work. Francis Alÿs has a series of works that explore the kinds of games that children play where they live. In another video, he documents the same action for the fencing around Fitzroy Square specifically.
His series, “Children’s Games” contains video documentation of the games children play all around the world including Mexico, Afghanistan, France, Belgium, Venezuela, and Morocco. The games are usually ones involving a group of children outside with, playing with bought toys or found items such as kites, marbles, water bottles, sticks, coins, old bike tires, and even broken pieces of mirror.
Francis Alÿs references this interest in children’s games in different bodies of work. A theme that often comes up in his work is the task of doing, undoing, and not doing.
An example of this “doing and undoing” is Francis Alÿs’ video “Reel/Unreel“, where “the action takes place along the bare cityscape of Kabul, Afghanistan. The cameras follow a reel of film as it unrolls through the old part of town—pushed by two children, uphill and downhill, like a hoop, inspiring an improvised narrative”
“On the 5th of September 2001, the Taliban confiscated thousands of reels of film for the Afghan Film Archive and burned them on the outskirts of kabul. People say the fire lasted 15 days. But the Taliban didn’t know they were mostly given film print copies which can be replaced and not the original negatives, which cannot.”
Another obvious example of this theme is Francis Alÿs’ video piece “Sometimes Doing is Undoing and Sometimes Undoing is Doing“.
“The films are played on a split screen and show two soldiers—one a member of the Western forces still occupying the country on the side of the official government and the other a Taliban anti-government fighter—as they take apart and reassemble their weapons, each in their own separate world.”
In “When Faith Moves Mountains“, Francis Alÿs congregates 500 volunteers to shovel a large dune on the outskirts of Lima, Peru to be moved 10 cm from its original location. Over the course of a day, the volunteers move the surface of the dune over, accomplishing an overall un-recognizable event. The principle for the action was “maximum effort, minimal result”, but the social aspect of requiring many people provides a great sense of achievement.
Francis Alys’s exhibition in the Tate museum takes after this photograph. In his works, Alys investigates the process of modernization in Latin America and Mexico. The mirage suggests that the goal is never reached. The deception comes from the promises the government makes about social change that are broken.
Likewise, Alys’ series of works exploring the nature of rehearsals also connotes this theme of deception. In the video, a red VW beetle drives up a hill as music of a brass band rehearsing is played. But, whenever the band pauses, Alys takes his foot off the acceleration only to roll back down. This references the idea that modernity in Latin America is always being delayed and never reached.
In a work called The Ambassador, he sent a peacock to represent him at the Venice Biennale of 2001. Given Alÿs’s apparent desire to produce work which acquires its meaning through engaging other people, the gesture might be seen as a way of subverting the Romantic cult of the artist as sole begetter of the artistic enterprise.
For the Discrete Intervention assignment, I looked for places where I was allowed to go, but where I shouldn’t be. There is no sign or notice that informs the person not to enter, however, social expectations alone prohibit entering
Andrea Aleman-Pastor
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