Alÿs’s installation is comprised of documentation of one of his most ambitious projects, to move a ‘mountain’ on the outskirts of the Peruvian capital, Lima. The moving itself was achieved by manual labor with a large team of 500 volunteer workers shoveling earth from one side of a large dune to the other over the course of the day.
In its displacement of the landscape, if ultimately only by a few centimeters, Alÿs’s project referred back to the land art of the 1960s and 70s. Rarely, however, are these remote works in the American deserts populated, and the artist sought to instill a socio-political dimension into the legacy of earthworks.