In 1985, approximately 320 km from Mexico City, a tectonic rupture occurred in the Cocos Plate. The Mexico City earthquake (Terremoto de México) was one of the most destructive earthquakes in the history of the Americas, with a magnitude of 8.1. The main impact was felt in the central and northern areas of Mexico City, where many industrial enterprises and less affluent people resided. It occurred on Thursday, September 19, 1985, at 07:18 local time. According to official state statistics, the earthquake resulted in the deaths of about 10,000 people, with 30,000 injured and 100,000 left homeless. Additionally, 412 buildings were destroyed, and over 3,000 were seriously damaged.
Francis Alÿs, a Belgian architect educated in Venice, flew to Mexico to help rebuild the capital after the disaster and ended up living there. There is information suggesting that Alÿs has Mexican roots. In the early 1990s, his interest was linked to specific urban contexts, places that were physically untouchable and whose history seemed inviolable. The only way to engage or enter into a dialogue with their history and daily life, to disrupt their inertia, was to introduce a virus – a verbal virus. The idea was to intervene in the imagination of a particular topos, without adding anything material to it, but instead playing on the level of metaphor or allegory. The first experiments with this concept were walks under the general name “The Collector” in 1990-92. Francis walked the streets of Centro Histórico in Mexico City with a toy made of magnets on wheels. After three days, people started talking about the crazy gringo walking with his magnetized dog, and after seven days, the story, the anecdote, remained, even though the character disappeared. This is how he began developing the idea of intervention in space, using fiction as a tool. It became his potential method of interacting with unknown places.
In 1997, in the small Mexican town of Tlayacapan, Morelos, with a population of around 7,000, Francis Alÿs spread a rumor about a man who left a hotel and never returned. He questioned the residents of Tlayacapan about this man until a true rumor, almost a legend, formed about him. People even began describing this man who never existed. The police launched a search. Notices about the missing person were posted throughout the town. If a rumor lands in a specific place at a specific moment in its history, if it manages to materialize fear or meets expectations, it becomes virulent and can grow. It circulates if it hits a nerve. Good rumors develop and begin to live their own lives. In an interview, Francis Alÿs admitted that he enjoys setting an idea in motion, defining the parameters of a situation, and then losing control over it.
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