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This article places the work of Mexico City-based artist Francis Alÿs in dialogue with contemporary technologies of spatial production. Concretely, I propose that through his engagement with the ways space is produced and delineated today, Alÿs's works comprise cognitive maps of the present, in Fredric Jameson's sense of this term: aids for understanding our place in the world of economic production. I argue this point by examining Alÿs's deployment of two visual tropes: ephemerality and participation. Both are central to his aesthetics, and they are also central to the operations of the high-tech mapping technologies that exemplify the production of space today. This understanding of Alÿs's work thus comprises a cartographic reading in two senses of the term. On the one hand, I read him in dialogue with the actual technologies of mapping that condition our spatial situation today, and on the other, I posit that the resultant reading helps us understand the relationship between digital and analogue technologies in a way that cognitively maps our situation in the contemporary world.
Keywords: Mexico City, Francis Alÿs, cognitive maps, digital maps, ephemerality, participation, art and media.
Palabras clave: Ciudad de México, Francis Alÿs, mapas cognitivos, mapas digitales, fugacidad, participación, arte y medios.
Fecha de recepción: 15 junio 2015
Fecha de aceptación: 15 noviembre 2015
1. Watercolor
Francis Alÿs's 2010 video Watercolor begins in a dreamy haze. The camera sits on a beach low to the ground, where we see stones being lapped by the waves. Ships wait anchored in the distance. The softness of the light, as well as the gradual saturation of the blue palette as our eyes scan from left to right, gives the impression that this video is true to its title: it feels like the filmic equivalent of a watercolor painting. The water is the Black Sea, we learn soon, and the beach is at Trabzon, Turkey. The figure that walks into the scene a few seconds into the video is Alÿs himself, filling a bucket that he will soon pour into a different body of water. We see this happen less than a minute later, when the camera cuts to a similar seascape in Aqaba, Jordan, on the Red Sea, a scene dated roughly a week after the first. The...