Francis Alÿs Movies

Each person’s action affects everybody. This fine principle of teamwork applies even when individuals are pulling in different directions....

Che Ling means “pull bell sound”. This ancient Chinese juggling is a form of yoyo, once popular in Europe as “diabolo”. Two...

Each couple tries to save an orange from gravity. When it falls, the pair is eliminated. This exercise in collaboration involves intimacy: faces are...

The Purépecha community has played Uárhukua for 3,500 years. The game symbolises the fight between the old sun – the night...

First we drive past harrowing scenes of missile and bullet damage, into an area that’s still intact. At a crossroads not far from the...

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...

In order to avoid being tagged, the shadow must run away. Only the body to which the shadow belongs can escape to protect the shadow from the...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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,...

This ancient Chinese game is played between two people, who in unison say ‘rock, paper, scissors’ before ‘throwing’ one of...

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?...

This game requires considerable practice and precision, especially on the uneven terrain of an urban waste lot. The action consists in flicking a...

The castle must be positioned just far enough from the sea to be completed before the tide reaches it. As the moat is dug by busy spades, the vacated...

The bay is peaceful, framed by low hills in the distance. Three boys stand thigh-deep in the brown water, trousers rolled up. The biggest, on the...

Boys stampede through the shells of small geometric homes, fancy boxes falling to bits in a dry-grass wasteland like futuristic ruins. The players...

Alÿs’s motto for When Faith Moves Mountains is “Maximum effort, minimum result.” For this epic project the artist invited five...