The Green Line.

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The Artist Francis Alys’s work called The Green Line (Sometimes Doing Something Poetic can become Political and Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become Poetic) is central to discovering the inverted geometry were crossing the urban borderland is reinterpreted, recomposed and short-circuited as it continuously becomes flexible unstable and almost liquid.

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Indeed in the work, Alys has captured this unstable, flexible liquid movement of a blurred borderline, dripping green paint from a pierced can as he walks along the Armistice line, which became known as the green line, drawn on the map in 1948 by Moshe Dayan at the end of the conflict between Israel and Jordan. But this only remained the case until 1967 following the Six Day War when Israel inhabited and occupied the Palestinian land east of this line.

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By leaving a trace of green paint across the landscape, Alys’s underscores the Green Line in its historical connotation, which becomes an act that determines power as an economical political practice or procedure ruling over differing social classes and groups. Indeed, one could say Francis exposes power relations that become filtered out re-reading the set of barriers, borders, and geographic limitation as tools of repression. 

Therefore, within this work, Alys draws our attention to The Green line along with the other borders that represent a global system of manipulation and control that create an unfair, unbalanced instrument for the circulation and division of global regions and territories across our world.