Francis Alÿs

Francis Alÿs
Born	Francis de Smedt 1959 Antwerp
Website	http://www.francisalys.com/

Francis Alÿs (born 1959, Antwerp) is 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 relocating to Mexico City, he has created a diverse body of artwork and performance art 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 of common space. Alys reconfigures time to the speed of a stroll, making reference to the figure of the flâneur, originating from the work of Charles Baudelaire and developed by Walter Benjamin. Cyclical repetition and return also inform the character of Alÿs’ movements and mythology—Alÿs contrasts geological and technological time through land-based and social practice that examine individual memory and collective mythology. Alÿs frequently engages rumor as a central theme in his practice, disseminating ephemeral, practice-based works through word-of-mouth and storytelling.

Alÿs grew up as Francis de Smedt in Herfelingen, about 25 miles outside Brussels, where his father was an appeals-court judge. He studied architectural history at the Saint-Luc Institute of Architecture in Tournai (1978–83) and engineering at the Istituto di Architettura in Venice (1983–6) before moving to Mexico City in 1986 where he arrived as part of a French assistance program after an earthquake to fulfill his Belgian civil-service requirement. Arriving just months after the 1985 earthquake, for the next 22 months he helped to build public works. At the end of this service, he took the name Alÿs to frustrate efforts by the Belgian authorities to meddle in his life. It was only years later that he turned it into his artistic pseudonym.

Alÿs' work encompasses many media often involving the participation and presence of the artist. These performed events are documented in video, photographs, writing, painting, and animation. In an interview with sociologist, Sarah Thornton, Alÿs, metaphorized his artistic role as a "midwife." Elaborating he said, "I am not an inventor. I'm just the one on the side."

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