Rafael Ortega

Stark though it is, the roof terrace with its low ochre-red wall and washed turquoise abstract seems the nearest thing to a garden among the forbidding cliffs of mass housing that rear up all around. Like bold tendrils of organic life, three young girls appear with jump ropes and show off some individual fancy licks, before switching to a stately coordination mode. Their bright white ropes make squiggles in the air like waved sparklers at night, while wrists and feet maintain a rock-steady beat. The joy of skilled movement, of pure synchrony, illuminates their faces.

Alÿs’s motto for When Faith Moves Mountains is “Maximum effort, minimum result.” For this epic project the artist invited five hundred volunteers to walk up a sand dune on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, shoveling in unison, thus displacing the dune by a few inches. Demonstrating a ridiculous disproportion between an effort and its effect, the work is a metaphor for Latin American society, in which minimal reforms are achieved through massive collective efforts. Participants in the project gave their time for free, reversing conservative economic principles of efficiency and production. Embracing rumor, urban myth, and oral history, Alÿs aims to make works that continue beyond the duration of the event itself, through stories disseminated by word of mouth.