In his exhibition Ciudad Ju\u00e1rez Projects<\/em> Francis Al\u00ffs takes the fire, so to speak\u200a\u2014\u200atakes fire on a walk through conflicted territory. In Paradox of Praxis 5: Sometimes we dream as we live & sometimes we live as we dream, Ciudad Ju\u00e1rez, M\u00e9xico<\/em> (2013), he kicks what appears to be a flaming football through the troubled city of Ju\u00e1rez, Chihuahua, Mexico\u200a\u2014\u200ajust across the border from El Paso, Texas. Ravaged by drug trafficking and turf wars, this once-prosperous city has seen its population decline in recent years, leaving a hollowed-out ghost town in its wake. Al\u00ffs kicks the ball, takes the fire in and out of filmed foregrounds and backgrounds in spurts of tumbling motion\u200a\u2014\u200alike the tip of a \u201cburning, inflamed metaphysics\u201d\u2009<\/sup>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - I borrow this term from Golding, \u201cAna-Materialism,\u201d 67.<\/span> that erodes the distinction between image and object. The fire\u200a\u2014\u200athis modicum of destructive, kicked potential\u200a\u2014\u200ailluminates, but also threatens, the seedy, desolate scenes unfolding in the border town through which it travels. Yet nothing catches; already ravaged, barren, and dusty, the ground scarcely responds to this chaos of flame, which only leaves a faint trail of wan, inconsequent embers in the brush at the end of its dark journey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Similarly, in his series Ciudad Ju\u00e1rez Postcards<\/em> (2013), Al\u00ffs takes the fire out of sixteen postcard images. He does this quite simply, by blacking out the rest of the picture. Only the light sources remain visible; abstracted and deprived of their tasks of illumination, they cut like gashes into thick, black surfaces. These almost-gone images seem to echo Blanchot\u2019s pronouncement: \u201cThe image requires the neutrality and the effacement of the world, it wants everything to return to the indifferent depth where nothing is affirmed, it inclines toward the intimacy of what still continues to exist in the void\u201d\u2009<\/sup>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Maurice Blanchot, \u201cTwo Versions of the Imaginary,\u201d in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader<\/em>, ed. George Quasha, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown: Station Hill, 1999), 417.<\/span>\u200a\u2014\u200aa sharp image of the wants of images for a time in which images seem the most wanting, at the edges of territories in which enlightened ideals struggle, like wan, inconsequent embers, to take root.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In his performances, Al\u00ffs often walks through, re-enacts, and activates the lines between conflicted grounds\u200a\u2014\u200aplaces where the harsh performativity of political borders burns trails through territories, and where political abstractions, such as universal human rights, wear thin. Such investigations seem appropriate for London, in light of the recent Brexit referendum vote,\u200a \u200awhich instantiates new political divisions for a post-rational Britain, now rendered all the more vulnerable to privatization and the erosion of workers\u2019 rights. The drug wars in Ciudad Ju\u00e1rez; the water crisis in Flint, Michigan; the angry, impoverished, inarticulate edges of \u201cLittle Britain.\u201d What might, at first, appear to be zones of exception\u200a\u2014\u200aisolated, unfortunate, overlooked border territories\u200a\u2014\u200anow appear as harbingers of a new rule: a state in which privatized, warring factions churn out regular turf wars, and spread ravaged borders willy-nilly across the globe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Universalism, so it seems, is burning out; yet, perhaps Enlightenment thought always had its pants on fire. As Chris Taylor reminds us in his theory of plantation neoliberalism,4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Chris Taylor, \u201cPlantation Neoliberalism,\u201d The New Inquiry<\/em>, July 8, 2014, accessed June 28, 2016, http:\/\/thenewinquiry.com\/essays\/plantation-neoliberalism\/.<\/span> Spinoza was haunted by the spectre of its cruelest irony: that the enlightened rationality of universal human rights was coupled, from its very outset, with dependence on slaver\u200ay\u2014\u200aon burning through lives. Today, this once-hushed-up irony rings loud and clear: a frank, undiluted flame that burns through the frame, through the city, through the city\u2019s self-image.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Al\u00ffs\u2019s video Children\u2019s Game #15: Espejos, Ciudad Ju\u00e1rez, M\u00e9xico <\/em>(2013), kids run through overgrown brush and abandoned houses in the Ciudad Ju\u00e1rez, playing a game with shards of mirror. When they catch the sunlight with their mirror and refract its beam onto one of their opponents\u2019 bodies, this counts as gunfire. The opponent falls down and plays dead, in a game fuelled by a light that both provides for and burns through images.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As S. M. Amadae argues, non-cooperative game theory provides the basis for a theory of neoliberalism.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - See S. M. Amadae, Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy <\/em>(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).<\/span> Strife and competition run rampant against a backdrop of scarcity, sacrificing human dignity to strategic rationality. This sea change from Enlightenment ideals (however flawed and partial) to the (gun)fire burning through neoliberal-era border- images reveals itself in the embers of Al\u00ffs\u2019s acts of inflaming.<\/p>\n\n\n![\"88_CR05_Rosamond_Alys_Linchados\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/88_CR05_Rosamond_Alys_Linchados-scaled.jpg\")
Linchados<\/em>, 2010.
Photo: courtesy of David Zwirner, New York\/London<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"88_CR05_Rosamond_Alys_Untitled](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/88_CR05_Rosamond_Alys_Untitled-II.jpg\")
Untitled<\/em>, 2013.
Photo: courtesy of David Zwirner, New York\/London
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"88_CR05_Rosamond_Alys_Untitled\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/88_CR05_Rosamond_Alys_Untitled.jpg\")
Untitled<\/em>, 2013.
Photo: courtesy of David Zwirner, New York\/London<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n