Francis Alÿs – When Faith Moves Mountains, 2002
Alÿs visited Lima in 2000 just before the collapse of the Fujimori government and found ‘a desperate situation that called for an “epic response”, at once futile and heroic, absurd and urgent.’ He returned in 2002 to organise When Faith Moves Mountains, persuading 500 Peruvian students to walk in a line up a sand dune on the outskirts of the city, digging as they went, thus displacing the dune by a few centimetres. The action – Alÿs’s most visually spectacular to that date – was filmed from various positions and the images were subsequently used on postcards, whilst the artist also encouraged the spread of news of the work through rumour and myth. – TATE