Francis Alÿs
When Faith Moves Mountains (2002). Two decades later
On April 11, 2002, several hundred people joined forces to move a dune a few centimeters from its original location. The work, titled When Faith Moves Mountains, was a heroic and absurd action that evoked the immense cost of social advances, while affirming the need for collective action and change. Conceived for The III Ibero-American Biennial of Lima, at the end of the Fujimori dictatorship, at the beginning of a new stage of democracy in Peru, When Faith Moves Mountains also proposed to mark an era of challenges and changes that wanted to defy pessimism and despair, with a surprising gesture: a profane miracle. Beyond that political sense, the action proposed a series of meditations and images. Made among the so-called “young towns” of the Ventanilla district, the work meditated on the importance that the incessant settlements of immigrants from the interior of the country had in the new configuration of Lima as a megalopolis. The event was accompanied by a paradoxical slogan that criticized the dogmas of economic rationality: “Maximum effort, minimum result.” Furthermore, the action advanced the importance that both in Alÿs' work and in the artistic research of the new century, the affinity of the terms “politics” and “poetics” would have. Two decades later, this exhibition explores the documentation left by this action that has become a reference for the social turn of 21st century art and in the memory of contemporary art in Peru. Beyond reconstructing its history, we think that the poetic voluntarism of that action is relevant in a once again turbulent moment in history.
Cuauhtémoc Medina
Curator
The genesis of "When Faith Moves Mountains (2002). Two decades late" was marked by unique circumstances. The III Ibero-American Biennial of Lima, 2002, in addition to opening Peruvian art to a global conversation, sought to weaken the siege that the dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori had imposed on the center of the capital. Cuauhtémoc Medina was asked to be part of the Biennial as curator from Mexico and he invited Francis Alÿs to carry out the project, which began to take shape when they explored the city together during the previous Biennial. Alÿs toured the informal urbanizations of Ventanilla and was struck by the resilience of the peasant immigrants who were transforming the city into a megalopolis. The sense of social and political desperation of the moment suggested to him the need to propose an “epic response” in the form of a social allegory. For the artist, it was essential to make a memorable and hopeful gesture. In his words, “a beau geste at once useless and heroic, absurd and urgent.”
“When faith can move mountains attempts to translate social tensions into narratives that intervene the imaginary of a place. The action is meant to infiltrate a society (including its art circuit) in its local history and social mythology. If the script answers the expectations and addresses the anxieties of a society at a certain moment and in a certain place, it will become a story that may survive the event in itself and transcend its historical nature. That way, it may have the potential of becoming a fable or a urban myth. (...)The dune effectively moved: it was not a literary fiction, it truly happened. It does not matter how much it moved, a infinitesimal displacement occurred, the equivalent of years of wind action. A tiny miracle. The story starts there. The interpretations of it do not need to be accurate, but shape themselves along the way.”
Francis Alÿs, 2002
Augusto Monterroso: Faith and the Mountains (1969)*
In the beginning Faith moved mountains only when it was absolutely necessary, whereupon the landscape remained the same for millennia. But when Faith began to spread and people found it was fun to move mountains, these kept changing place and it became increasingly difficult to find them where one had left them the previous night; which of course implied far more difficulties than the ones it solved.
So the good people then chose to abandon Faith and nowadays mountains generally stay in their place. When a rockslide happens on the highway, thereby killing several travelers, that means that someone, very far away, or close by, had a slight glimmer of Faith.
* From: La oveja negra y demás fábulas, 1969.
From a material point of view, the April 2002 action consisted of a day of exhausting work, which took more hours than the team could imagine, and which represented a challenge for
all its participants, above and below the dune, in front of or behind cameras and loudspeakers. From the point of view of ideas, representations and dreams, the action had exponential productivity.
Themes such as the role of the peripheries in the constitution of cities, the vision of internal migration as a socially and culturally revolutionary force, the form of mobilization as a social aesthetic, and above all, the defense of the importance of the expenditure of effort on something apparently free and irrational as the center of the possibilities of historical change, were alluded to by the work in an equally mobile and changing agenda.
The motto that accompanied it, “Maximum effort, minimum result” inverts the economic law of efficiency, to signify the immense cost that minimal changes in our societies represent.
It was a representation, not without irony, of Latin American history as an arduous experience of enthusiasm, wear and disappointment, which nevertheless requires vindicating our conviction as a force for change.
When the faith had a varied and wide dissemination, as the artist and his collaborators had foreseen, it was to become an urban myth. The participants knew they were actors in a prodigy made of will and foolishness. The witnesses began to multiply as the work began to unfold in the flow of images and words. The artist arranged for there to be several forms of dissemination for the work. A postcard and sending images over the Internet made When Faith one of the first viral events in the art world. As an installation, the work was exhibited for the first time in the old Desamparados station (then the main headquarters of the Lima Biennial) in a combination of tables with documents and images, and a first cut of the videos of the action. Given the impossibility of summarizing the event in a univocal image or story, the artist and curator prepared a book that collected the documents of the action, and a series of critical perspectives. Its design was inspired by the simultaneously sensational and didactic spirit of a book about the psychic and illusionist Uri Geller. The video documentary made for that book became the most effective account of the work, and for two decades it has been constantly on display practically around the world.
The exploratory visit that the artists and the curator made to Lima in October 2000 coincided with the death throes of Alberto Fujimori's regime. The political tension in the streets of the city was extraordinary, although there were signs that the dictatorship was losing control of the situation, such as the actions of “Colectivo Sociedad Civil" washing the Peruvian flag in the Plaza de Armas.
That was the backdrop that Alÿs challenged not only by walking all over the city, and especially the peripheries of informal settlements, but by deciding that the action he would propose would be anything but an illustration of the tragedy.
On a second exploratory trip in early 2002, Alÿs defined the location of the action on a dune in Ventanilla, where the provisional constructions of the immigrants were already looming.
One of the aspects that made Alÿs' work in Lima memorable was the way in which he proposed an artistic approach to the conditions of precariousness and social tension, far from the aesthetics of documentation, mourning or denunciation. The work was defined by offering a specific response to a critical time and moment through a counter-image. The images Alÿs invented to describe his idea were hypnotic: lines of a crowd forming a kind of mass bulldozer, with shovels or "lampas" loosely inspired by a Duchamp readymade. He also produced much more allegorical images, such as a giant hand or a comb displacing geography.
Upon arriving in Peru in early April 2002, the team discovered that the action was unprepared and lacked participants. If the action finally took place on April 11, it was largely due to the good fortune of having incorporated filmmaker Rafael Ortega into the adventure. In a couple of weeks the team organized the event practically from scratch. The support of the president of UNI's Architecture Student Center, Richard Perales Orellana, was key to getting the collaborators involved. Ortega's experience in film production in Mexico, Medina's experience in student mobilizations and Alÿs' dedication to redefine the project, ended up saving in a few days what had to be done in the previous months.
On the day of the action, April 11, 2002, we had one more opportunity to make the action fail. We had called the volunteers to report to the buses that would take us to Ventanilla at 7:30 a.m., hoping to avoid working under the midday sun. An hour later than the scheduled time, only about thirty volunteers had arrived at the University. Suddenly, in an inexplicable miracle, people began to arrive, in some cases up to two and a half hours later.
The exhibition of the work in the old Desamparados station (the main venue of the Lima Biennial) was the product of an improvisation that combined, in a cumulative way, words and images of a very diverse nature: a first cut of several videos of the action, surrounded by exhibition tables with documents, thoughts, testimonies and photographs, which pointed to the impossibility of summarizing the event in an univocal image or story.
As luck would have it, this action was one of the first cultural events to benefit from the change of materiality of 21st century communication systems. Just a couple of hours after the end of the action, and with the help of the images of a then very new digital camera, we sent a series of emails communicating the event to colleagues and friends accompanied by images. Those emails viralized the action in a matter of hours, an effect that was reinforced by the mailings sent by a nascent agency in the global art world, e-flux, and by the publication of articles in magazines such as Artforum and Art Nexus.
In 2005 the Turner publishing house published a book that, in addition to analytical texts, sought to create a collage of images, testimonies and marginal reflections. The book was inspired in form and content by popular science volumes such as the Time-Life series, as well as a book on the alleged paranormal powers of Uri Geller. For that book, artist and filmmaker prepared a documentary in the style of the "making off" documentaries of commercial cinema, which soon proved to be the best way to communicate the work in countless exhibitions around the world.