"...I spend a lot of time walking around the city...
The initial concept for a project often emerges during a walk. As an artist, my position is akin to that of a passer-by constantly trying to situate myself in a moving environment.
My work is a succession of notes and guides.
The invention of a language goes together with the invention of a city. Each of my interventions is another fragment of the story that I am inventing, of the city that I am mapping."

(Francis Alÿs, Mexico City 1993)

"Zocalo, Mexico D.F., Nov 14 1998"

Zócalo (Mexico City, 1999 collaboration with Rafael Ortega) is a 12 hour documentary following the progression of the shadow of the flagpole in the Zócalo (the main square in Mexico City) during the course of a day.
The Zócalo was redesigned at the beginning of the revolutionary era as a setting for huge propagandist spectacles and became with time the ideal space to express public discontent. Alÿs' film records how arbitrary social encounters can sometimes be perceived as sculptural situations.

The interview
The Last Clown, Barcelona 2000