Paula Roush /// Francis Alÿs: The Clandestine Way

As for all cultural practices centred on the everyday, Francis Alÿs body of work has for many years been pointing to the question of how to deal with the social. In his case, the street and the city space have become the articulating points around which aesthetic actions have been performed, residues for an archive of the daily life collected, and a critical spatial poetic developed. But if there is one site expansive enough to study the everyday practice of Francis it is the city of London where his pedestrian production took off for a five years project entitled Seven Walks. Walking as a form of social research into the everyday, is at the core of the London project, and as a strategy that allows for the mixing of fiction, and empirical observation, it has the advantage of always being a work in progress. Crucially, working in the city commercial and financial centres, raises interesting issues to the problem of the everyday, partly due to the technoscape of surveillance and partly due to residues from other urban paradigms that coexist in ways not always visible.