Zócalo, Ciudad de México
Francis Alÿs
22 de mayo, 1999
[Zócalo, Mexico City, May 22, 1999]
In the late twentieth century, Alÿs combined symbolic actions and interventions based on urban routes by documenting sculptural social situations derived from the interplay among streets, bodies, and objects. Most of these works took place in the privileged theater of downtown Mexico City. Within this quadrant, the symbolism of power clashes with a lifestyle that resists, in practice, to the authoritarian economic rationalization and the empire of the motor vehicle by staging a different kind of modernity.
Zócalo is the icon of how Alÿs transformed downtown Mexico City into an extension of his art studio, as well as into a conceptual theater. On May 22, 1999, in collaboration with filmmaker Rafael Ortega, Alÿs filmed the city’s main square in order to document a previously unconscious social form: the way in which passers-by, seeking shelter in the shade cast by the flagpole, form a human line that functions as a virtual sundial, which shifts by three degrees for each of the 12 hours of sunlight. This seeming miracle has become an enduring image of contemporary art in the region—and a key example of how Alÿs sought to transform community life through the emergence of an urban myth.
FRANCIS ALŸS (1959)
Zócalo, Ciudad de México, 22 de mayo, 1999, 1999–2017
Zócalo, Mexico City, May 22, 1999
Video installation. 36 pieces
Color video, stereo sound, 2 speakers, drawings and photographs
12 h
Acquisition through the SHCP Pago en Especie program, 2018
