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Francis Alÿs

Guards
09.22.06 - 10.15.06
Video installation — les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse

Born in 1959 in Antwerp (Belgium) he lives in Mexico City.

 

Francis Alÿs makes immaterial works which are subtle intrusions in the everyday life of the city. His preferred "medium" is walking. Drawing inspiration from some of the artistic activities of the 1960s (Minimalism, Land Art, Richard Long's walks), Alÿs explores on foot the world's great cities (from his adopted home, Mexico City, to Paris, Copenhagen, São Paulo, Jerusalem, New York and London) in order to unwind the thread of makebelieve stories.

 

The film Guards(2005), which is being screened in the auditorium at les Abattoirs – Musée Frac Occitanie Toulouse, is conceived like a partly improvised dance, involving a battalion of the Queen's Guards that is scattered about the City of London. The soldiers are first randomly dispersed in the streets, and then gradually meet up and reform their square, before being scattered once again. As an allegory of the human need to “reproduce the perfection of the machine”, this short sequence illustrates the alternating cycle of order and the breakdown thereof. Alÿs also sees it as the image of rumour – a fiction billowing and spreading, and in the end invading reality.