[from the pressrelease]
The Gibraltar Projects: Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River is an expansive group of works made from 2005 onward that derive from Francis Alÿs’ yearslong efforts to create the illusion of a bridge spanning the Strait of Gibraltar. The  Gibraltar Projects consists of paintings, drawings, sculptures, videos, notes, and ephemeral materials. With this body of work, Alÿs examines geographical and philosophical notions of borders as well as larger issues concerning freedom of movement. Francis Alÿs: “According to myth, the Strait of Gibraltar is the place where Hercules separated Europe from Africa and opened the Mediterranean Sea from the Atlantic Ocean. The Strait seemed like the obvious place to illustrate this contradiction of our times: how can one promote global economy and at the same time limit the global flow of people across continents?”

The body of work on view relates to a public action that took place simultaneously in between Tangier, Morocco, and Tarifa, Spain, cities facing each other across the Strait of Gibraltar. A line of local children, each holding a small boat fashioned from a shoe, assembled on the beach in Tarifa, while a counterpart line of children holding shoe-boats gathered on the beach in Tangier.

Attempting to bridge not only continents but also cultures, the two lines of children waded into the lapping waves, trying to move toward each other, holding their boats up to the horizon line, while the tide relentlessly pulled them back to the shore, in an effort to answer the question posed by Alÿs: “Will the two lines meet in the chimera of the horizon?”

Alÿs: “The video and the paintings and drawings are about the idea of migration, the idea of the dream, the idea of fantasy, and the idea of failure, but through quite different languages: the drawings [and paintings] are everything I cannot do in real life and in videos. It’s the more allegorical part of the project.”