The Brooklyn Rail

Six million years ago, the Mediterranean Sea disappeared, most likely because of radical climate change and tectonic shifting. The resulting desiccation left behind a gigantic basin where the sea had once been and land bridges connecting previously separated landmasses. Around five and a half million years ago, the Atlantic Ocean flowed back into the basin and recreated the sea—possibly in as little as two months—overwhelming the strip of land that connected Africa to Europe. Four thousand years ago—before Christianity and Islam developed—myths told stories about the natural world and our relationship to it. One of them described the creation of what is now called the Strait of Gibraltar: rather than climbing over Mount Atlas, Hercules smashed through it, leaving two halves of the mountain on either side, one in Spain and the other in Africa, in Morocco or Spanish-controlled Ceuta. These sides are known as the Pillars of Hercules, so-called since at least Pliny the Elder, a man who knew something about cataclysmic tectonic events.

Sixteen years ago, artist Francis Alÿs realized The Gibraltar Projects: Don’t Cross the Bridge before You Get to the River (2008), a performance that called for collaborators to launch boats on each shore, thereby connecting the European and African coasts across the 7.7-mile narrow point of the Strait of Gibraltar. After finding that the cooperation of the Spanish and Moroccan governments entailed too much bureaucracy and propaganda, Alÿs turned to contributors who saw the artwork as play: children. In simultaneous performances and the two-channel video that documents their actions, Alÿs’s young accomplices walk in a line into the sea and launch boats made from sandals and babouches, suggesting a psychic bridging of the waterway that separates continents, languages, religions, and cultures. In working with children, Alÿs not only incorporated this piece into his long-running “Children’s Games” series, but also raised its stakes, as we think about the immediate safety of the children in the water, the physical divide that exists between the two continents, and the role that the Mediterranean plays in maintaining that separation. For, as a vitrine of newspaper documentation from the past seventeen years makes clear, we cannot and should not think of The Gibraltar Projects without also considering the European migrant crisis that began in 2015. Facing war, political oppression, and climate catastrophes in their home countries, more than one million migrants moved into Europe from Africa and Western Asia, many of them attempting this crossing in overcrowded boats. The video’s sounds of lapping seawater and children’s delighted shrieks serve as a soundtrack to our perusal of this reporting. The devastating 2023 earthquake in Morocco and the wildfires that swept across Spain and southern Europe in the past few summers reverberate as well, their environmental impact reinforced by the room-sized map that Alÿs has pieced together and wheatpasted to the floor of the passageway connecting the galleries. In addition to cities, factories, farms, and shrines, the maps demarcate water management zones. Here, the Strait of Gibraltar is spanned by a bridge precariously constructed from the intertwining tines of two forks.

Drawings and paintings made in conjunction with the performance’s preparation and beyond its realization are on view in two rooms. An untitled suite of drawings (2007–20) in a case in the exhibition’s first gallery depicts what seem to be landmasses colored yellow gold, green, and occasionally white. They are sometimes contiguous and sometimes separated by blue water, and are marked with binary labels that recall the hic-sunt-leones othering in Medieval maps: real/imaginary, in/out, migrant/tourist (when present, the third landmass complicates the labels: utopia/dystopia/retropia). Hercules makes several appearances in the large central gallery: in a 2007–08 painting splitting the continents to unite the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and in a drawing (Study for Gibraltar “Continents Series”) kicking the earth apart to create two lands—“Us” (“Nosotros”) and a plural or formal “You” (“Vosotros”). Hercules is drawn in a ghostly, earth-toned contour but bears one solid, black leg, mixing him racially while linking him formally and art historically to St. Christopher carrying the Christ Child. In a reproduction of a painting by the Sienese artist Sano di Pietro, Christ wears his black boots while the giant saint—who has removed his own shoes—carries him across a body of water. Christopher struggles to cross because Christ carries with him the cares and troubles of humanity, his own Herculean labor (indeed, sharing enormous stature and superhuman strength, Hercules and St. Christopher were sometimes linked, most notably by the humanist Erasmus).

Elsewhere in the large gallery are two poignant installations, both evoking play and the freedom that comes from it. 64 Shoe Boats (2007–08) lines up the found-object boats and paces them across the floor to a leaning mirror that doubles them. Unlike the raucous kids who once held them, these are orderly and tightly packed, almost cuddling; they don’t point toward the mirror, but rather are placed perpendicularly to it, every other one facing right or left. Visually, this suggests the two shores while permitting us to imagine sliding our own feet into the performance. As anthropologist Tim Ingold has noted in his writings on Alÿs’s work, children’s play is a liberatory, developmental, and collaborative tactic, and because of that mutuality, it is also open-ended rather than closed. The shoes remind us of the partnership between collaborators, and between them and the Earth.

But the decision to place the shoes in such a way does more than that: the direction of the shoe-boats crosses that of the line into which they’ve been placed. They’re creating a grid, drawing a line and then intersecting it. Across the room, a cutout in the pink wall—split into two tones like a horizon—houses a screen playing the video Children’s Game #2: Ricochets (2007), featuring two boys skipping stones into the sea. The younger one collects the stones and hands them off to his older companion who slings them, some of the pebbles hitting the waves just as they crash, splashing like hooked fish. Here, too, we see open-ended play and the determination to make marks, to create—as Wassily Kandinsky once wrote—surface through drawing lines. The stones skip counter to the pull of the waves while the resulting ripples draw perpendicularly against the stretch of the breaks, instituting their own longitude and latitude. The actions of the kids documented by Alÿs establish, even if momentarily, a personal sovereignty, the dignity of which encompasses and pushes beyond concepts of nations, borders, and the abstractions that map them. Before long, a world is made.