Six million years ago, the Mediterranean Sea disappeared, most likely because of radical climate change and tectonic shifting. The resulting desiccation left behind a gigantic basin where the sea had once been and land bridges connecting previously separated landmasses. Around five and a half million years ago, the Atlantic Ocean flowed back into the basin and recreated the sea—possibly in as little as two months—overwhelming the strip of land that connected Africa to Europe. Four thousand years ago—before Christianity and Islam developed—myths told stories about the natural world and our relationship to it. One of them described the creation of what is now called the Strait of Gibraltar: rather than climbing over Mount Atlas, Hercules smashed through it, leaving two halves of the mountain on either side, one in Spain and the other in Africa, in Morocco or Spanish-controlled Ceuta. These sides are known as the Pillars of Hercules, so-called since at least Pliny the Elder, a man who knew something about cataclysmic tectonic events.
Sixteen years ago, artist Francis Alÿs realized The Gibraltar Projects: Don’t Cross the Bridge before You Get to the River (2008), a performance that called for collaborators to launch boats on each shore, thereby connecting the European and African coasts across the 7.7-mile narrow point of the Strait of Gibraltar. After finding that the cooperation of the Spanish and Moroccan governments entailed too much bureaucracy and propaganda, Alÿs turned to contributors who saw the artwork as play: children. In simultaneous performances and the two-channel video that documents their actions, Alÿs’s young accomplices walk in a line into the sea and launch boats made from sandals and babouches, suggesting a psychic bridging of the waterway that separates continents, languages, religions, and cultures. In working with children, Alÿs not only incorporated this piece into his long-running “Children’s Games” series, but also raised its stakes, as we think about the immediate safety of the children in the water, the physical divide that exists between the two continents, and the role that the Mediterranean plays in maintaining that separation. For, as a vitrine of newspaper documentation from the past seventeen years makes clear, we cannot and should not think of The Gibraltar Projects without also considering the European migrant crisis that began in 2015. Facing war, political oppression, and climate catastrophes in their home countries, more than one million migrants moved into Europe from Africa and Western Asia, many of them attempting this crossing in overcrowded boats. The video’s sounds of lapping seawater and children’s delighted shrieks serve as a soundtrack to our perusal of this reporting. The devastating 2023 earthquake in Morocco and the wildfires that swept across Spain and southern Europe in the past few summers reverberate as well, their environmental impact reinforced by the room-sized map that Alÿs has pieced together and wheatpasted to the floor of the passageway connecting the galleries. In addition to cities, factories, farms, and shrines, the maps demarcate water management zones. Here, the Strait of Gibraltar is spanned by a bridge precariously constructed from the intertwining tines of two forks.