A block of ice the size of a shoebox is melting in the middle of the street. A complete outsider to its surroundings, uncomfortably alien, the cube pierces through the routinary landscape with its absurdist presence. But I can’t think of any other place where this incongruity would be more at home than a crowded street in Mexico City —a land of casual postmodern goofiness. A melting block of ice on the asphalt is one of the city’s most enigmatic symbols, a riddle that is easy to solve if you are attentive enough.
In 1997, artist Francis Alÿs dragged a block of ice through the streets of downtown Mexico City for more than nine hours for his action titled “Paradox of Practice1 (Sometimes making something leads to nothing)”. Melting water marked the territory, drawing an impermanent line across the historic center. The evaporating evidence, impossible to exhibit in a gallery space, manifested a delicate poetic power. Alÿs, a Belgian artist residing in Mexico since the 1980s, actively uses the surrounding environment for his works. “Sometimes making something leads to nothing” refers to the situations witnessed by the artist on the streets of the capital: strenuous and monotonous labor that doesn’t lead to the fulfillment of any practical end or personal goal, but only alienates workers from their desires and values — work that makes as little sense as pushing a block of ice until it melts away completely. The action is proposed as a reflection on the great disproportion between the effort and the result, an absurd waste of energy and time.The societal paradox here is that repetitive labor that alienates the worker is normalized and encouraged under capitalism. However, a person who takes the courage to expose the meaninglessness of this sort of productivity by performing a senseless task that wasn’t imposed on them by an employer is seen as a threat to the system.
Alÿs is a strolling artist: his inspiration comes from the streets. To walk aimlessly is a personal technique to detonate the artistic process and a form of approaching reality. Drifting for Alÿs is a direct way of interacting with the context and provoking dialogue. City as a place of conflict —contemplative flânerie as an anticapitalist practice. Questioning the logic of productive time through investing it in apparently senseless exercises, Francis Alÿs subverts habitual order based on the idea of efficiency.
The Belgian artist is not the first one to use the act of aimless walk as a political statement. Flânerie was an important practice for French situationists, a group of leftist intellectuals who were active in the early 1950’s. Guy Debord, a Marxist philosopher and one of the prominent members of the collective, characterized situationist drift as “the practice of de-familiarization and the choice of encounters.” Abandoning the idea of destination, alcohol-fueled thinkers moved through environments on a random basis guided by free spatial association. Situationists engaged with the urban habitat by treating public spaces as if they were repressed content that could be unlocked by their psyche. Guy Debord lived in the city, in which urban planning had been devised in part as a means of civil oppression: the reason why the Parisian Grand Boulevards are so extended and straight is because they were designed for moving troops at speed and firing artillery to suppress rebellious crowds. Situationists believed that by moving haphazardly through the streets they could destroy the concept of the city as a tool of hierarchy and power.
Mexico City’s innate chaos saturates the multilayered urban fabric, preventing the metropolis from becoming a rigid structure. The Mexican capital is alive with surreal randomness that seems irrational when captured in fragments, but somehow makes perfect sense when observed in its totality. This metropolis is not a system but a living organism that encourages creative exploration. Sophie Greenspan is another artist who experiments with complex city dynamics. Lively and whimsical, her street projects playfully engage with the environment, helping to raise spatial awareness and make public space more human-friendly.
Painting a mural is one way of doing it, as you are turning the street into a place where humans can exist and interesting things can happen. If you don't have public space it's hard for the neighbors to form together and resist gentrification or take control of what they want to happen in that neighborhood. We have to fight to keep the space public, free and nice to be in.
One of Sophie's most recent urban projects is an illustrated map of Mexico City designed to uncover a fanciful structure of the capital. Biking around the city, the artist started paying attention to how streets were often grouped into themes, with categories as diverse as oceans, philosophers, deities, poets and continents. She explains:
I always knew the city contained universes, but I found it contains constellations, satellites and planets too. If you learn to pay attention, the entire city becomes a tarot card reading full of symbols and coincidences.There is a person who used to live in the neighborhood Medialuna (crescent moon) and the streets are named after planets there. I’m interested in how it feels to live in these categories: you can grow up in a galaxy and visit your friend who lives on Mars or your girlfriend who lives on the Moon.
Sophie’s idea was to make a map to navigate through the city by using not geographical but poetic markers. She continued her investigation looking for the themes in Google Maps.
I would find one weird street name and be like: hm, is it just one or is there a whole theme here? — and then try to figure out what the theme was. There is a neighborhood near the airport that has around 50 streets and all of them start with X. Why would you do this?
Though some street names have history behind them — like the ones from la colonia Industrial that were named after emblematic Mexican factories as a promotion of the national economy — most of the themes seem to be quite random. Sophie struggled finding information about them online:
To me, it seems to be very subjective. I don't think it was a city authority who did it, more likely, it was just somebody. At some point in time, there was an opera fan who decided to name all the streets in their neighborhood as operas and so on. Like so many things in Mexico City, the street names embrace the surreal over the strictly logical.
Sophie’s poetic map is an example of creative urbanism that playfully explores the facets of the city, adding a new mythological layer to its underlying structure. By focusing on conceptual themes of the streets, she aspires to grasp the collective sense of Mexico city created by its residents. It presents a conceptual way of reading the city, similar to the psychogeographic practice of the situationist dérive. Members of the collective claimed that during their walks they could detect a “sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres.” Contemporary psychogeographer Will Self once got from London to New York on foot: he walked from his house to Heathrow, took a plane to New York and then walked from JFK all the way to his hotel. The tiredness he felt after this journey tricked his body into believing that he had made the entire distance by foot. “Our sense of place has always been defined by our bodies…I need to know how physical and human geography really marry up.” Self states that by using cars and taxis, we enclose ourselves into microenvironments that prevent us from understanding the physical geography of where we live. “The act of using your feet and the act of navigating with a map forces you to constantly orient yourself within physical geography.”
Walking is storytelling: the street supplies its own narrative. Unlocked by the psyche, the public space becomes a playground where the privilege of amusement is available to everyone. Strolling through the street Rascarrabias (scabies), I stumble upon a coffee shop with a sign reading “Social tourism” hanging at the entrance. The barista explains to me that they show screenings a couple of days a week and have an event where men can talk with other men about their feelings on Wednesday. Passing through Cacaxtla, Cuicuilco and Chupícuaro — streets named after Mexican archaeological zones —I finally find what I’ve been looking for on Cumbres de Maltrata (heights of mistreatment). A block of ice. I sit on the corner, preparing myself to wait until it melts away completely, my Mexico City riddle.