On November 4, 2000, Francis Alÿs illegally purchased a gun from a shop in downtown Mexico City. [1] He then left the shop, loaded gun in hand, and walked through the streets of the city. Twelve and a half minutes later, Alÿs was pursued by the police – he was quickly apprehended, pinned against the police car, searched, and taken away for his arrest. This event constituted the first part of Alÿs’s Re-enactments (2001) – a work in which the artist sought to execute a performance and then carefully recreate it based on the documentation of the performance. 　　The script was simple: he was to buy the gun and move through the streets until something occurred to interrupt him. Alÿs’s initial performance, from his first grasp of the gun until his arrest, was filmed by his collaborator, artist Rafael Ortega, and this footage became the basis for the performance’s reproduction. Alÿs and Ortega replicated the initial performance the same day, a project only possible because Alÿs managed to evade punishment for his crime. Alÿs was able to both negotiate his release from police custody – ostensibly through bribery, a common practice in negotiating with the police in Mexico City – and persuade the officers to participate in the staging of the second performance. In the re-enactment of the performance, the policemen acted out their roles in the scene of Alÿs’s arrest. This time, however, Alÿs used a fake gun and Ortega took a significantly different approach to filming the performance. In the two-channel video, the footage of Alÿs’s performances are juxtaposed; labeled “Real” and “Re-enactment,” they play simultaneously, comparing the footage of the initial performance and its recreation. 　　A Belgian-born artist who has lived and worked in Mexico City since 1986, Alÿs is well known for his ambulatory urban interventions in which he walks through the streets, often in the Centro, Mexico City’s historic center, disrupting the daily operations of the city’s public spaces. Like most artists who work with performance, Alÿs relies on the documentation of his live performances – videos, photographs, sketches, notes, and the like – to exhibit his work in galleries, where the majority of viewers encounter the work. In his 1997 work The Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Doing Something Leads to Nothing), in which Alÿs was filmed while pushing a large block of ice through the streets of Mexico City for more than 9 hours until it dissolved into the sidewalk, the only material consequences of his labor were the video and photographic documents of the performance. 　　In Re-enactments, Alÿs explicitly takes up the issue of conveying performance through documentation. In speaking about the conceptual frame of Re-enactments Alÿs has said, 　　I wanted to address the practice of the “performance” which is characterized by something that is quite unique: its underlying condition of immediacy. I wanted to question the rapport we have today with the practice of the performance, which is usually transmitted by way of another medium, mediated exactly, and thus “delayed” by the document. 　　Here Alÿs describes one of the central issues in the critical debate surrounding performance and its documentation: the tension between the immediacy of performance, which is responsive to and contingent on the specificities of its setting and its public, and the remoteness of documentation, which reaches its audience only after the performance has ended, and is therefore detached from the conditions of the live performance. While the documentation brings the viewer within reach of the performance, it maintains a distance from the live event. Re-enactments brings this tension to the foreground by merging the live performance and the document as central axes that are both fundamental to the structure of the work and shape its outcome. The design of the work as a whole requires both performance and the video documentation – the filming of the initial performance facilitates its recreation, which likewise produces a video; the two are interwoven and mutually dependent.