… it is always kind of bouncing or ricocheting.
This is from ‘Russell Ferguson in conversation with Francis Alÿs‘ in the Francis Alÿs monograph first published in 2007. Alÿs is from Belgium and trained as an architect; he is now an artist based in Mexico City:
Ferguson: There is a stereotype of the architect as an egomaniac who collaborates out of necessity but at the same time attempts to exert total control. In a lot of your projects you have worked collaboratively with a variety of other people. I’m wondering to what extent you are attracted by the possibility of surrendering some control, and to what extent you need to retain control personally over what you produce.
Alÿs: Perhaps you should ask my collaborators. [laughs] The collaboration process is to watch an idea bounce back and forth, and eventually develop its own course in that bouncing (el rebote). The project starts with a mess of notes and drawings, incidental quotes and documents, and usually out of that process the medium defines itself spontaneously. At that stage I start looking for specialists in that specific medium to enter the project, and their translation of the plot automatically reshapes the original concept. The more the project evolves, the more this bouncing back and forth between myself and the collaborators intensifies, and it can lead to a final shape sometimes quite far from the original intention. It’s in that process that the project takes on its own life and develops. The more ambitious the logistics of the project, the more I will turn into a producer or a coordinator of the project and, when it happens, a spectator of my own fantasy.
And then there are all the other ingredients of the live event. Once the axiom has been posed and the location set, the development and outcome of the piece happens within an open field of possibilities, in the sense that any outcome of the event becomes a valid answer to the premises of the piece. Once the action is launched, there is no longer any strict or unilateral plan to be followed. Only the actual course of the action itself will provide a response to the preliminary axiom.
The only constant rule I have witnessed is that if the storytelling — the plot proposal — is clear and strong enough, it will resist all these mutations. The situation will unfold in a way not unlike what your intuitive expectations were. It is the test of the scenario. If the scenario does not hold, the action will deviate and become something else.
Paradox of Praxis (1997); documentation of an action, Mexico CityFerguson: Despite the inevitable collaborative element in architecture, it is also about making something that is very fixed and with very clear boundaries. It seems that perhaps one of the things that led you away from architecture is an interest in where those boundaries are more permeable, or where there are spaces between fixed entities.
Alÿs: You mean the cracks in the system?
Ferguson: Yes. I’m also thinking about the man in the Zócalo who spends his time scraping the gaps between the flagstones with a wire hook. I thought of that figure as in a way a self-portrait of you, in the sense of this interest in exploring the spaces in between.
Alÿs: When I stepped out of the field of architecture, my first impulse was not to add to the city, but to absorb what was already there, to work with the residues, or with the negative spaces, the holes, the spaces in between. Because of the immense amount of material produced on a daily basis by a huge city like Mexico City, it is very difficult to justify the act of adding another piece of matter to that already saturated environment. My reaction was to insert a story into the city rather than an object. …
[ … ]
Ferguson: I guess I see what I’m calling the dreamlike aspect of your work also in some of your performance works, not just your paintings — for example, the loose thread on the sweater that unravels further and further and further (Fairy Tales, 1995-98). It is a real thing that takes place in the world, yet is also —
Alÿs: Yes, but it can also travel as an anecdote or fable.
Ferguson: So you see them as fables or parable rather than as dreams, or even daydreams. Like the man whose sweater catches on something and who doesn’t notice for a mile.
Alÿs: Until someone else notices. In Stockholm, once the walk was done and the sweater unravelled I retraced my steps to document the journey, following the long blue thread on the street and in the park. Midway back I ran into this old lady who was patiently rolling a ball of blue yarn under her arm, carefully gathering up the wool of my unravelled sweater — maybe to knit a similar one at home.
Ferguson: Is the passing on of the story where humour comes in? In some of your projects there is a pungent humour that contributes to its persistence as a story.
Alÿs: Humour helps to catch the spectator’s attention. It’s a way of trapping him in the narrative. You make me think of something else. My iconography has often been described as naïve, flatly figurative, two-dimensional, but that simplicity can sometimes help seduce the viewer’s eye. It’s the direct language of the sign painters, where communication for any audience comes first. That’s what fascinates me about Magritte. His painting is so flat and somehow physically disappointing, yet it is so performative and communicative. Magritte himself was coming from the world of advertising. There are billions of images around us, and they move fast and are extremely persuasive and efficient. Painting works against that speed effect. It is slow, very poor in a way, so if you can make that little contact, provoke that little spark in someone’s head, it is a small miracle amid the speed of our digital age.
[ … ]
Ferguson: So the work is not really generated primarily in the studio?
Alÿs: Not so much any more. … It’s the relay point. I think most of the creative process happens in the spaces in between — in between home and the studio, the studio and the lab, in between conversations with collaborators, and also, as I am always working on several projects in parallel, in between different states of mind over the course of the day. And bouncing back and forth between these different scenarios is the only way for me to have a critical distance with any of them and for me to progress. I am never exclusively in one narrative at the time. Rather, I am always linking data from different sources.
… It’s like when you walk in the city. Walking here from the Zócalo there have been fifty different situations happening, with fifty incidental noises, smells and images. They’ve all just been furtive glimpses, bits of incidental information, but while walking lost in your thoughts you have somehow integrated them all, and they have shaped your thoughts at the arrival point.
Ferguson: But you’re a fast walker.
Alÿs: Because, unlike a few years ago, I wouldn’t want to be confused with a tourist. [laughs] In Mexico City only innocent tourists go slowly.
Ferguson: I wanted to ask you about the importance of walking in your work, starting with walking around your neighborhood here, but also more generally about walking as a generator of projects and ideas and stories.
Alÿs: Walking, in particular drifting, or strolling, is already — within the speed culture of our time — a kind of resistance. Paradoxically, it’s also the last private space, safe from the phone or email. But it also happens to be a very immediate method for unfolding stories. It’s an easy, cheap act to perform or to invite others to perform. The walk is simultaneously the material out of which to produce art and the modus operandi of the artistic transaction. And the city always offers the perfect setting for accidents to happen.
There is no theory of walking, just a consciousness. But there can be a certain wisdom involved in the act of walking. It’s more an attitude, and it is one that fits me all right. It’s a state where you can be both alert to all that happens in your peripheral vision and hearing, and yet totally lost in your thought process.
[ … ]
Ferguson: Does the model of the flâneur interest you?
Alÿs: The flâneur is a very nineteenth-century European figure. It goes with a kind of romanticism that does not have much space in a city like Mexico. The city is too crude and too raw, and everything seems to happen in an immediate present. There is no space for nostalgia.
[ … ]
Ferguson: … Are you aspiring to make something that is both poetical and political?
Alÿs: … What I try to do really is to spread stories, to generate situations that can provoke through their experience a sudden unexpected distancing from the immediate situation and can shape up your assumptions about the way things are, that can destabilize and open up, for just an instant — in a flash — a different vision of the situation, as if from the inside.
[ … ]
Ferguson: Either the story or the image can work in your mind, or your collaborator’s mind, or the viewer’s mind, and generate some other event or image.
Alÿs: Yes, it is always kind of bouncing or ricocheting.
-Julie
Coloring 