Bluejeneando

Pia Camil’s art projects often evolve out of collective, community-based projects. She regularly collaborates with communities in Mexico but her works have international resonances, foregrounding the ways in which neighbourhood groups form part of international systems of production and exchange. In doing so, she draws attention to inequities in the global economy and seeks to address them at a local level through the production of her artworks.

Bluejeaneando comprises 80 pairs of blue jeans, sewn together at the waste and modified to function as cushions. The sculpture is intended to be used by the audience as they see fit: to build mounds to climb, to make private refuges, to create comfortable environments to gather with friends, or to provide seating from which to look at other works of art.

As with many of the artist’s works, Bluejeaneando also incorporates playful and subversive references to the body. As Camil has stated: “The title refers to a slang word used to describe the act of “making out”. That simulation for desire can quickly turn into a grim experience if we interpret the jeans as a pile of dismembered bodies. The work is meant to invite the viewer to interact and play but often that later thought remains present. That tension is at the center of the work.”

The majority of the jeans were sourced from a secondhand clothes market, known as a paca-market, in the Iztapalapa area of Mexico City. Often the clothes sold in paca-markets were originally fabricated in Latin America before being sold to American corporations, only to later return to Mexico as secondhand items (sometimes illegally) to satisfy the needs of lower income consumers. Bluejeaneando thus reflects on the formal and informal industries in the global economy while also addressing sustainability issues in the textile industry.