Book pp46-169
190x245h 5 feb
5/2/10
4 As Long as I’m Walking Mexico City 1992
Alÿs understood walking, strolling and drifting as a form of social resistance, but also as a poetic discipline that inspired ideas for works and conditioned his urban perception. It was always an exercise analogous to thinking, with a temporality akin to that of narrative. For years, he kept in a corner of his studio a list of things he wasn’t doing while walking, compiled on a piece of polystyrene, almost as if it were a dogma that would govern his practice. Not by chance, those aphorisms were written in terms of negations: the potentially endless number of temptations, forms of production and feelings which the walk forbade. This first attempt to theorise on his personal methodologies reflected on walking as a state of freedom from art, production and emotion. It encapsulated the way drifting through the city became his philosophy of living even more than an artistic medium.
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