The Free Wheel and Adrenalin Tours

This investigation examines the work of the contemporary visual artist Francis Alÿs. Focus is given to Alÿs’s work, Reel/Unreel (2011). In that work, cameras follow the trace of a reel of film as it pushed through Kabul by a group of local children. This performance of bodies is viewed as a practice and poetics of engaging and grasping a world of “rogue states”. In this performative space, the path of pushing the reel through the old town of the Afghan capital follows the gyratory convergences of force and law, force and justice. I examine the spacing of the performative bodies in Reel/Unreel as a structure of the insistent repetition of a wheel that sets to work an encircling violence within this singular war-zone.