Francis Alÿs: As Long as I'm Walking - Paperback

by Francis Alÿs (Artist), Nicole Schweizer (Editor), Julia Bryan-Wilson (Text by (Art/Photo Books))

Published to accompany Francis Alÿs' (b. 1959, Antwerp) major exhibition at the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne in autumn 2021, this reference monograph is centered on some of the Belgian-born Mexican-based artist's key motifs and features: his 30-year groundbreaking video practice, the importance of strolling and walking for his artistic method, his interest in children's games which he has filmed in various countries since 1999. From urban wandering to the exploration of territories and their borders documented by moving images, Alÿs' work proposes a poetics of space through brief narratives whose finesse and accuracy invite access by the general public. If his work questions the link between artistic act and political intervention, the artist always works by allusions, with remarkable precision and economy of means, preferring poetic polysemy to frontal political commentary, favoring the merging of planned imaginary spaces with his own fictional spaces.