Most Popular Francis Alÿs Trailers
Total trailers found: 78
The Nightwatch Trailer (2004)
22 February 2004
The Nightwatch documents an action realised by Alÿs in 2004 in which he released a fox into London’s National Portrait Gallery in the middle of the night and used the museum’s CCTV system to follow its movements.
Children’s Game #38: Ellsakat Trailer (2023)
09 May 2023
Neither indoors nor out, but on the doorstep, where you might play a quick game while waiting for someone.
Children’s Game #2: Ricochets Trailer (2007)
01 January 2007
The bay is peaceful, framed by low hills in the distance. Three boys stand thigh-deep in the brown water, trousers rolled up.
Children’s Game #9: Saltamontes Trailer (2011)
01 January 2011
Girls and boys, together for once, hunt through lush grass and undergrowth, on the lookout for well-camouflaged grasshoppers.
Bolero (Shoe Shine Blues), 1996-2007 Trailer (2008)
02 December 2008
A traditional animation, hand-drawn in 500+ frames (which are also on display as part of the installation).
Children’s Game #16: Hopscotch Trailer (2016)
01 January 2016
Outside a stark tent city, this version of the game involves a grid of squares, two across by six long, marked by lines gouged into the arid ground.
Children's Game #23: Step On A Crack Trailer (2020)
02 January 2020
A sprite in a blue pinafore, plimsolls, and white facemask flits through Hong Kong, enclosed in a quicksilver bubble of magic.
Children’s Game #32: Estrellas Trailer (2022)
11 April 2022
Why do all the bottle tops start the same way up, grouped together, if there are two teams? When is the ball launched with a plank and when by hand?
Children’s Game #5: Revolver Trailer (2009)
01 January 2009
The props in this game are wooden sticks or branches shaped like guns. Two kids pretend to fire at each other, making elaborate and highly varied shooting noises.
Children’s Game #12: Musical Chairs Trailer (2012)
01 January 2012
The game is filmed from above in a single take, emphasizing the inexorable process of subtraction. Six children place five chairs in a row, facing in alternate directions.
Paradox of Praxis 5 Trailer (2015)
16 September 2015
One of Francis Alÿs’ series of performative videos that politicize absurd or seemingly futile gestures, Paradox of Praxis 5 documents the artist’s nocturnal perambulations through Juárez as he kicks a ball of fire along the city’s desolate streets.
Children’s Game #19: Haram Football Trailer (2017)
03 January 2017
In August 2017, during the final phase of the Fatah (Conquest) Operation, the Iraqi Army pushed Islamic State combatants back from the east bank of the Tigris River in Mosul.
Zapatos Magnéticos Trailer (1994)
04 January 1994
During the 5th Havana Biennial, artist Francis Alys put on his magnetic shoes and took daily walks through the streets of the city, collecting scraps of metal lying in his path.
Children’s Game #28: Nzango Trailer (2021)
04 January 2021
Born in the recent past in school playgrounds and now a national sport, Nzango is a female-only game. The aim is to imitate, or more mysteriously, anticipate, the leg movements of the facing player. The pace is set by both teams singing and clapping in unison, faster and faster. Local variants thrive, ignoring the official rules. This, the girls’ own invention, involves “minus” and “times” signs, the first a mirror image – A’s right leg, B’s left leg – the second a crossed diagonal. And yet all the outsider perceives is a series of lightning confrontations, as pairs, then other formations, hop and kick ecstatically, advance and retreat according to an inapprehensible logic, telepathically improvised, perhaps. What geometry rules the final blur of legs?
Children’s Game #36: Kujunkuluka Trailer (2022)
12 October 2022
Many of us played this as kids, spinning on the spot until collapsing. In a group there’s a competitive element, each tries to be the last one still upright; but it’s only, always, about inner sensation.
Children's Game #1: Caracoles Trailer (1999)
01 January 1999
High above the city that shimmers like a distant sea, a boy kicks a plastic bottle half full of liquid up a steep shanty road of light and dark.
Children’s Game #8: Marbles Trailer (2010)
02 January 2010
This game requires considerable practice and precision, especially on the uneven terrain of an urban waste lot.
Children’s Game #15: Espejos Trailer (2013)
02 January 2013
Boys stampede through the shells of small geometric homes, fancy boxes falling to bits in a dry-grass wasteland like futuristic ruins.
Politics of Rehearsal Trailer (2005)
01 January 2005
Politics of Rehearsal (2005) Focuses on the theme of rehearsal, which is so characteristic of Belgian-born, Mexico City-based Francis Alÿs' work.
Children’s Game #33: Schneespiele Trailer (2022)
12 April 2022
The most basic sense of fun improvises on chance gifts of the environment. Snow-fun is too immediate to need rules, either.
Children’s Game #4: Elastic Trailer (2008)
02 January 2008
Close-up on shiny boots, knotted elastic, cobbles. Within the confines of a courtyard two demure little girls are playing a game of confinement, entrapment, escape.
Children’s Game #11: Wolf and Lamb Trailer (2011)
03 January 2011
A group of children hold hands in a circle. The child in the middle plays the lamb, the one outside is the wolf.
Children’s Game #18: Knucklebones Trailer (2017)
02 January 2017
Knucklebones, or jacks, has existed for more than 2000 years and was first played with the astralagus bones of a sheep.
When Faith Moves Mountains Trailer (2002)
11 April 2002
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.
Children’s Game #27: Rubi Trailer (2021)
03 January 2021
With all the charm of flick soccer, Subbuteo, pinball, and other miniature passions, this is played on a small circle of stubby broken-off sticks like a frontier fort buried in the sand, enclosing two facing, immobile teams also made of little sticks.
Children’s Game #35: Kluddermor Trailer (2022)
11 October 2022
Children getting into a frightful mess that only parents could sort out: this familiar scenario plays out subversively, for the rescuing ‘Mother’ is just a child.
Children’s Game #25: Contagio Trailer (2021)
01 January 2021
An update of tag, the scariest of kids’ games. Instead of the touched person being “frozen,” they are contaminated and activated as viral transmitters.
Watercolor Trailer (2011)
21 December 2011
"Mixing water from the Red Sea with water from the Black Sea". Trabzon, Turkey-Aqaba, Jordan, 2010.
Children’s Game #7: Stick and Wheels Trailer (2010)
01 January 2010
On a wide, gravelly mountain road, earth-coloured dwellings in the background, small boys scamper behind tyres of different thickness and circumference, beating them onwards with a stick.
The Rehearsal I Trailer (2001)
01 January 2001
A red VW Beetle drives up a hill, an image which is accompanied by a loud soundtrack of a brass band's rehearsal.
Children’s Game #14: Piedra, papel o tijera Trailer (2013)
01 January 2013
This ancient Chinese game is played between two people, who in unison say ‘rock, paper, scissors’ before ‘throwing’ one of the three figures at each other: closed fist or flat hand or two fingers in a V shape.
Children’s Game #31: Slakken Trailer (2021)
07 January 2021
Snail racing is a game of unequal chances, especially when your snails are not trained champions, but randomly plucked off a wall; individual temperaments and moods count as in any sport.
Children’s Game #3: Coins Trailer (2008)
01 January 2008
We see three kids from behind, standing at a set distance from a peeling, whitewashed wall. The rule is that each player throws a coin against the wall, that drops and rolls back on the pavement; the player whose coin remains the closest to the wall can keep the other players’ coins.
Children’s Game #10: Papalote Trailer (2011)
02 January 2011
A 10-year-old boy in a pink salwar kameez stands near a dune-coloured wall under a powder-blue sky. He frowns and gesticulates, conversing in stops and starts with the heavens or at least with the gusting wind because you don’t see his kite at first, and the string is so fine you can’t see that either.
Children’s Game #17: Chunggi Trailer (2017)
01 January 2017
Reminiscent of male football tricks where a ball is juggled frontally off the knee or foot, Chunggi, popular among Nepalese girls, appears a lot more difficult.
Reel/Unreel Trailer (2012)
01 January 2012
The cameras follow a reel of film as it unrolls through the old part of Kabul—pushed by two children, uphill and downhill, like a hoop.
El Gringo Trailer (2003)
01 January 2003
As is well known, ‘gringo’ is the derogatory term Mexicans use to refer to NorthAmerican citizens.
Children’s Game #26: Kisolo Trailer (2021)
02 January 2021
Kisolo is one of a thousand variants of the global Ur-game, Mancala, a “sowing” game sometimes still played with seeds even when using a board.
Children’s Game #30: Imbu Trailer (2021)
06 January 2021
Though mosquitoes have almost as many sensory auditory cells as we do, their hearing is for the sole purpose of finding a mate.
Children’s Game #34: Appelsindans Trailer (2022)
13 April 2022
Each couple tries to save an orange from gravity. When it falls, the pair is eliminated. This exercise in collaboration involves intimacy: faces are only an orange apart.
Children’s Game #6: Sandcastles Trailer (2009)
02 January 2009
The castle must be positioned just far enough from the sea to be completed before the tide reaches it.
Children’s Game #13: Piñata Trailer (2012)
02 January 2012
A piñata is a papier-mâché figure stuffed with sweets. Common at birthdays in urban patios, here we find it in a field, where a garish Superman dangles between tall poles on a rope jerked by an adult, to make hitting harder.
Sandlines, the Story of History Trailer (2020)
25 January 2020
The children of a mountain village near Mosul re-enact a century of Iraqi history, from the secret Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916 to the realm of terror imposed by the Islamic State in 2016.
Children’s Game #29: La roue Trailer (2021)
05 January 2021
Over the city of Lubumbashi looms the mampala or slag heap of the Étoile du Congo cobalt mine, its lower slopes today sifted by the clandestins, lithium hunters who risk their lives to feed our global battery market.
The Green Line Trailer (2004)
12 June 2004
In The Green Line, for which the axiom was ‘sometimes the political is poetic, sometimes the poetic is political’, Alÿs walks holding a punctured can of dribbling green paint along the contested width of the so-called Green Line established between Israel and its neighbours following the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
Children’s Game #22: Jump Rope Trailer (2022)
06 April 2022
Stark though it is, the roof terrace with its low ochre-red wall and washed turquoise abstract seems the nearest thing to a garden among the forbidding cliffs of mass housing that rear up all around.
Patriotic Tales Trailer (1997)
13 August 1997
The video shows the artist walking in circles around the flagpole (“Madre Patria”) in Zócalo, Mexico City’s monumental central square, which is flanked by government institutions.
Tornado Trailer (2010)
14 June 2010
For the last decade Alÿs has made repeated trips to the dusty highlands south of Mexico City to chase the tornadoes that frequently occur in that region at the end of the dry season.
Re-enactment Trailer (2000)
08 August 2000
For this work Alÿs purchased a gun in Mexico City then walked through the city streets with the weapon in his hand.
The Silence of Ani Trailer (2015)
05 September 2015
Once upon a time Ani was one of the most important cities of the Middle Ages. People started abandoning the city until all life left and silence fell into Ani.
Children’s Game #39: Parol Trailer (2023)
11 October 2023
First we drive past harrowing scenes of missile and bullet damage, into an area that’s still intact.
Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing) Trailer (1997)
01 January 1997
For more than nine hours, Francis Alÿs pushes a block of ice through the streets of Mexico City until it completely melts.
Children’s Game #37: Che Ling Trailer (2023)
08 May 2023
Che Ling means “pull bell sound”. This ancient Chinese juggling is a form of yoyo, once popular in Europe as “diabolo”.
