Francis Alÿs: Children’s Games

“But if I were to make what you call ‘a more complete story,’ a feature film, I would not start at the beginning or the end,” mused Francis Alÿs in an early interview. “I would need to work from some middle, because the middle point, the in-between, is the space where I function best.”¹ In Alÿs’s recent film Sandlines, the Story of History (2018–2020), the children of a mountain village near Mosul recreate a century of Iraqi history from some point between official history and themselves. Yet we need not have waited to see that Alÿs’s creations arise from