Born in Antwerp in 1959, Francis Alÿs initially trained as an architect. Following a period of study in Venice he decided to both leave Europe and to discontinue his work as an architect, relocating to Mexico City. Alÿs’s recent projects include Bolero (1996–2007) a short animation, accompanied by over 500 preparatory drawings, harnessing the rhythms of a humble shoeshine, and Politics of Rehearsal (2005–07), a 30-minute video that combines footage of a speech by President Truman, narration by critic Cuauhtémoc Medina, and a rehearsal for a striptease. Rehearsal parallels socio-political promises from Latin America with the tactics of a stripper – always leaving something to be desired. For his best-known work, When Faith Moves Mountains (2002), Alÿs recruited 500 volunteers at Ventanilla, outside Lima, Peru. The volunteers formed a single line at the foot of a giant sand dune; using shovels they shifted the dune by four inches. In 2004 Alÿs was the inaugural winner of the Blue Orange Prize in Berlin.
