Francis Alÿs: Rethinking Boundaries

Francis Alÿs: Wet feet_dry feet: borders and games
Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong
28.10.20 – 16.02.21

Translated by Bridget Noetzel

The Straits of Gibraltar
 are 7.7 nautical miles wide ( 13 km )
 and separate Africa from Europe.
 If a line of kids
 leaves Europe towards Morocco,
 and a line of kids
 leaves Africa towards Spain,
 will the two lines meet
 in the chimera of the horizon?¹

Building bridges

It is with a bold vision that Francis Alÿs ( born 1959, Belgium; based in Mexico since the 1980s ) presents Wet feet_dry feet: borders and games, his first Hong Kong solo show at Tai Kwun. In the main hall, the first thing the viewer sees on entering is 64 Shoe Boats ( 2007 – 8 ), a string of adorable, lovingly made model sailing boats paired with a mirror that makes the boats seem to stretch out infinitely. We can imagine a group of mischievous, curious children lined up, holding their little boats and walking into the deep ocean. This was part of Alÿs’s 2008 situational work Don’t Cross the Bridge Before Getting to the River, a work performed simultaneously in Morocco and Spain, which envisioned an ephemeral human bridge over the Straits of Gibraltar. However, the children, laughing and playing, transform this serious performance art into an ocean game, shutting out the tragic reality of the countless migrants who fall overboard trying to make the journey.

Alÿs’s first boat bridge project took place during the 9th Havana Biennial in April 2006. He brought together more than a hundred private and commercial boats from Havana and Key West, Florida, to create the one-off performance piece Bridge/Puente. The inspiration for the piece came from a news article he read in 2005 about the United States’ ‘wet feet, dry feet’ policy for Cuban migrants. If the migrants successfully made it to land, they would be given the right to stay, while those intercepted on the water would be repatriated to Cuba. In this context, was a bridge between parts of the Florida Keys water or land? What if you had one foot on land and one foot in the water?

During the two years of exhibition preparation, Alÿs created several concept drawings for bridges, which represent his thought process and create a dreamworld in pale blues and greens. Land masses are connected by an extended leg, a snake, a ladder, a boat, a line of people, and even a couple of forks. This reminded me of the ancient Chinese myth of the Cowherd and the Weaving Maid, or the dream before the Buddha’s enlightenment. According to the continental drift hypothesis, the seven continents and four oceans are the natural results of movements in the Earth’s crust; narrow strips of ocean between continental plates became zones of trade contact and commercial prosperity, but they also became places of frequent conflict and war. With these considerations in mind, Alÿs focused on the Straits of Gibraltar. However, it was impossible simply to transfer a piece from Havana to the Straits, because the institutional communication required was akin to that needed for a military action. This communication was part of the entire art project, because in the end, a bridge-related performance piece demanded the collective engagement of the participants. When the artist saw a group of children skipping pebbles on the water by the beach in Tangier, Morocco, he transformed this boat bridge into a piece about a child’s game, entitled Children’s Games #2: Ricochets.

Games

Children’s games are another long-term focus of Alÿs’s work. As he has travelled around the world, he has recorded children’s games from an onlooker’s perspective. These games are played in military conflict zones as well as ordinary streets and alleys, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Nepal, Jordan, Mexico, Venezuela, France, Belgium and Hong Kong. In a child’s world there are no military conflicts, political antagonisms, essential livelihoods, existential threats or other thorny problems of the adult world. Children use their imaginations, easily transforming streets, fields, empty houses and other public spaces into havens for play. Given just a piece of sky and a small stone, they can play for quite a while. The exhibition presents a room of children playing games, reminiscent of a hall of mirrors, showing games that transcend time and space. Viewers see a child in Balkh, Afghanistan, wearing a pink outfit and flying a kite, children in Iraqi refugee camps absorbed in hopscotch, Venezuelan children catching grasshoppers and Belgian children building sandcastles… When all these scenes are presented on different screens in the same exhibition hall, Alÿs creates a world of children’s games without national boundaries, which temporarily makes the viewer forget that this world has war, bloodshed and conflict: these children’s games transcend conventions, languages and borders. Friedrich Schiller once said, ‘Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.’ However, children can also be seen as half grown-up, and a child’s world could be considered an imitation of an adult world; here, Alÿs represents injuries ( the grasshoppers ), territories ( the sandcastles ), gun battles ( the branches and sticks ), and other elements from the adult world. Are children really as pure as adults imagine?

Boundaries

Alÿs’s thoughts on boundaries can be traced back to a performance piece he did, walking and dripping green paint along the armistice demarcation line created at the end of the 1948 – 9 Arab–Israeli War, to produce The Green Line ( 2004, Jerusalem ). In When Faith Moves Mountains ( 2002, Lima ) he invited 500 volunteers to move a 500-metre-long sand dune about 10 centimetres from its original place – a futile and spectacular form of resistance. The French Situationist theorist Guy Debord believed that experiencing various situations in the city in a playful way would attenuate psychogeography. Alÿs has said, ‘Sometimes doing something poetic can become political, and sometimes doing something political can become poetic.’

Many theories about boundaries, within the framework of the nation state, emphasise that boundaries are fixed, rigid lines, but globalisation has normalised the scattering and flow of people. In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia ( 1980 ), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari proposed the idea of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, which sees boundaries in a more fluid and utopian way. Boundaries are natural, but they can also be man-made, such as those between the land and the sea, between continents, between nations and between people. Boundaries such as the Straits of Gibraltar, a boundary between Europe and Africa, formed naturally as the tectonic plates moved. However, it is people who give those boundaries significance, reflected in the flourishing trade and bloody conflicts that once occurred in the Straits of Gibraltar. Boundaries can also be artificial, as shown by the boundaries left by the colonial era, such as those between African nations and between India and Pakistan. Borders cause prosperity when they bring cultures together and disputes when they are ambiguous.

Map of the Straits ( Gibraltar ) ( 2008 ), which uses two forks to bridge the Straits of Gibraltar on a map, is a very special work of art. Do the forks, as everyday eating utensils, suggest the interaction of food cultures between Europe and Africa? With human migration, the customs and cultures of different groups interact and fuse, so when will humanity move towards the Great Harmony? If it cannot be realised in real life, then can it be redeemed in the world of children’s games? Here, ‘children’ refers to the childhood of humanity, and not simply the children around us in our real lives.

Francis Alÿs’s poetry and sensibility are ‘anchored by geopolitical concerns and individual possibilities while being grounded in a spontaneous everyday life’.2 With these three interlocking projects, he prompts viewers to rethink the social issues of migration and borders, which can be extended to the concept of boundaries in a general sense, and the breaking of boundaries through children’s games.

1. Wet feet_dry feet: borders and games, exhibition wall text.

2. Ibid.