when cities move sand
2024
a resituated reperformance of When Faith Moves Mountains, Francis Alÿs, 2002
collect a shovel’s worth of sand from the streets
I’m taking a performance/intermedia studio class and we had an assignment to find a performance and re-perform it. this was meant for us to practice researching, as well as understanding that act of performance outside the barrier of coming up with our own and having to own said idea.
for mine I went around the streets collecting sand from the cracks and gutters. the work I chose to reference was francis alÿs’s when faith moves mountains. while on the surface my efforts seem to match this work in material only, I see opportunity for additional comparisons. while they may primarily juxtapose each other, ultimately I think my appropriation of the work provides valuable contemporary insights.
photos by ellyse egan
Alÿs’s motto for When Faith Moves Mountains is “Maximum effort, minimum result.” For this epic project the artist invited five hundred volunteers to walk up a sand dune on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, shoveling in unison, thus displacing the dune by a few inches. Demonstrating a ridiculous disproportion between an effort and its effect, the work is a metaphor for Latin American society, in which minimal reforms are achieved through massive collective efforts. Participants in the project gave their time for free, reversing conservative economic principles of efficiency and production. Embracing rumor, urban myth, and oral history, Alÿs aims to make works that continue beyond the duration of the event itself, through stories disseminated by word of mouth.
Gallery label from Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception, May 8–August 1, 2011.
mine required quite minimal effort to achieve, I walked around with a handheld designer* vacuum, easily collecting sand (though slower than a shovel in a desert, I barely broke a sweat)
how do I see this in comparison to the original work? well in ways it makes me uncomfortable, as the efforts were meant as a metaphor for the difficulties within latin american politics. but what’s making me uncomfortable has less to do with my referencing, and more to do with the difference in realities. I can’t avoid my privilege, in my mind it’d be far more rude to go to the coast and do a more 1:1 reperformance**
we were asked to consider our positioning when picking a work. I used this prompt to further these considerations—to further put forward an aspect that would impact the piece regardless of performance.
by using a vacuum I’m making sure the audience can have an idea of my positioning, while also allowing for a way of understanding the work to be further explored;;;
the idea of the [minimal] result of my performance is complicated; to an outside observer it is a random act of futility—why bring a vacuum outside to collect granules off the street?
(this was something I first heard in my mother’s voice when I talked about using my vacuum, a concern for the vacuum cleaner… an indoctrinated fear of inside vs outside, a pointless separation when considering what is being vacuumed is the same)
however to me, this act is not futile, in fact I see it as forward thinking in a quite pessimistic way. I desire for this work to be read within the context of sand being a monetarily valuable material, one that has its own blackmarket, and a demand that outpaces supply.
I’m not sure if I see it as mining/extraction, or finding/collecting.
while the publicness, legality, and hobby-adjacent personal-pointlessness of it seems to favor finding—my hope is that the larger implication of sand coupled with my own materials (plastic shipping bag, dyson vacuum) and the Alÿs’s commentary on capitalism, that an idea of mining for future security will be read.***
the idea that a material as ubiquitous as [river] sand is required in a plethora of urban building materials is intriguing to me—and what’s even more intriguing is that the sand can be found on the street.
how did this sand come to be? the street sand in question ends up differing from the original piece to the point that it’s not exactly worth the comparison (since alÿs was dealing with desert sand which can’t be used in construction, and non zero amount of my sand isn’t construction grade (anymore)).
the street sand consists of any granular sized mineral found outside in the urban environment. this ends up being a mixture of;
sands brought in for construction that gets spilt or leftover
asphalt that has been eroded by cars (as well the inverse—pieces of tire)
glass that was broken years ago and has since formed minute spheres
dust from sidewalk repairs
or really any broken down building material (building as both noun and verb)
when comparing my work to alÿs’s original, and I ask, how many people were involved? the truth is I have no way of knowing. it could be seen as a solo performance, but the material truth is that I had very little involvement.
this unknown—the creation of the material is obviously whats most fascinating to me,
however I see this comparison as a bonus point of consideration, it is not the most important thing to read in the piece—that mine has involuntary participation that has and will continue to happen as we continue our lives in the city.
*dyson vacuums aren’t good. don’t buy one, they break and they run out of battery, (and here’s a reddit post of a zine someone made about hating james dyson)
**I think that a 1:1 reperformance would have its own strengths in this instance, and would arguably be better for highlighting the original work. yet, I also fear it would danger too close to “oppression olympics”,,, of course there is something to be said in finding the similarities of international politics, especially with capitalism globalization.
***the amount of material collected isn’t really enough to make money off of (.<<50cents), part of the issue is the sheer amount of sand needed to produce cement and the sheer amount of cement needed for a project is what leads to beaches disappearing and rivers being dredged (more to the point of my work’s futility).