In his first pieces, Francis Alÿs sought to recognize and adapt to the setting that received him after moving from Belgium to Mexico, as can also be seen in one of his later works, La Malinche (1997). 'The Collector' is one of the first exercises that he carried out with the aim of understanding the dynamics of a city that did not seem to need one more addition to its complex urban structure. Thus, he created a small object similar to a dog on rubber wheels and a magnetized body. As Alÿs walked through the streets of Mexico City pulling the artifact by a rope, the debri of the city —metallic objects, such as bottle caps, wires, nails, etc.— adhered to the body of the collector.
In this way, the artist influenced the social space through a practice contrary to that dictated by his training as an architect: if the architecture of the twentieth century promotes encoming spaces and adding more and more material to build the ideal of the city In modern times, 'The Collector' absorbed all the debris of an overly saturated polis. In addition, Alÿs turned public space into a source of research in which elements that usually go unnoticed are raw material for analyzing the dynamics and memory of a society.
On the other hand, the piece, also recorded on video, represented the beginning of Alÿs' interest in tales and fables. In an interview, the artist recalled that after three days of walking the collector through the streets, people saw him as a crazy gringo who was walking around with a magnetized dog. But after a week ed, the act turned into a story or anecdote that people continued to share even when the figures were no longer present. This is how the idea of introducing urban myths, stories or fables as part of particular moments in the history of a place began.
'The Collector' traveled to different cities between 1991 and 2006.
AC, July 2020.
—Bibliographic references
Francis Alÿs, Relato de una negociación. Mexico: INBAL, 2015.
Russell Ferguson, Francis Alÿs: Politics of Rehearsal, United States: Hammer Museum, 2008
Cuauhtémoc Medina (et al.), Diez cuadras alrededor del estudio, México: Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, 2006.
Francis Alÿs: Walking Distance From The Studio, : Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2005
—Links
http://francisalys.com
Chloe Johnston, "Wandering Through Time: Francis Alÿs’s Paseos and the Circulation of Performance" in Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2, October 2010. [online] http://liminalities.net/6-2/paseos.pdf
In his first pieces, Francis Alÿs sought to recognize and adapt to the setting that received him after moving from Belgium to Mexico, as can also be seen in one of his later works, La Malinche (1997). 'The Collector' is one of the first exercises that he carried out with the aim of understanding the dynamics of a city that did not seem to need one more addition to its complex urban structure. Thus, he created a small object similar to a dog on rubber wheels and a magnetized body. As Alÿs walked through the streets of Mexico City pulling the artifact by a rope, the debri of the city —metallic objects, such as bottle caps, wires, nails, etc.— adhered to the body of the collector.
