The Brooklyn Rail

A red banner blazoned with the words “PIA CAMIL FOR SALE” cascades from the open window of an aging modernist high-rise in central Mexico City. Spanning more than six stories and billowing luxuriously in wind-chased altitudes, the streamer is clearly selling something. But it’s not real estate that’s on the market; it’s the artist and her work. Floors above in the same building, Camil and Brett Schultz present a collaborative open studio musical performance. Swathed jauntily in red at the other end of ninety feet of fabric banner, Camil croons shoegaze-y into a microphone, drumsticks handy and Roland keyboard at her side. Bleeding between urban frame and intimate participatory experience, implicating the entwinement of market and artistic practice, confusing the figure with the landscape in which it stands, Pia Camil for Sale (2010) exemplifies the artist’s capitalist critique delivered through collaborative and performative methodologies—ideas that repeat across the works and essays in the artist’s first monograph Friendly Fires.

The book presents thirty-two projects—For Sale among them—realized between 2006 and 2023, a span that edits out figural juvenalia to focus on a body of work that comments on the circulation of goods and culture in the global economy. Beyond illustrating Camil’s impressive catalogue raisonné, the publication features analytic essays by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Justine Ludwig, and Karen Cordero Reiman, a poetic introduction by Gabriela Jauregui, and an interview with the artist conducted by Elise Lammer. Fajardo-Hill highlights Camil’s Situationist exchange with the city as a selective interpenetration of public and private spheres, placing particular emphasis on the artist’s curtain works, which make reference to urban advertisements and draw on the detritus of industrial production and international waste. (In true Debordian fashion, one Spanish word for “billboard” is “espectacular,” a term which Camil has used to title a number of works.) Karen Cordero Reiman takes up this mantle to accentuate the political tenor of Camil’s applications of used clothing and its relationship to import-export economies in Mexico and Central America. A notable example of a work in this vein, Divisor Pirata (2016)—“pirated divider” in English—is a wearable sculpture for more than eighty participants that re-realizes the saintly white cotton of Lygia Pape’s 1968 Divisor as a Mexican pink amalgam of secondhand t-shirts purchased in CDMX’s Iztapalapa market. Activated by Camil in Guatemala City, the castoff apparel thematizes border-crossing and the lifecycle of international trade: fabricated in Mexico and Central America for use in the United States and re-exported in bulk back to these countries.

Looking beyond the works as microcosms of the global economy, Justine Ludwig illuminates the ritual and reliquary in Camil’s fetishization of the commercial apparatus. In the artist’s hands, flocked jewelry busts become pareidoliac masks comparable to Miztec-Aztec archeological finds and retail slatwall transubstantiates into shaped Stella canvases with their intrinsic intimations of cultural capital. Though not explicit in Ludwig’s analysis, a comparable operation is unspoken in Camil’s wearable works, such as Divisor Pirata or Here Comes the Sun (2019), which manifest a push and pull between the genericism of a one-size-fits-all logic and the subsumption of individual into multitude overt in the act of collective performance. Tongue in cheek, the works declare that we are all equal in the eyes of capitalism.

In continuity with Camil’s collective form of practice—which has taken shape through collaborations with craftspeople and other artists—the book is itself a dialogic portrait of the artist’s enduring relationships and references. Of the five contributors, four have been Camil’s artistic partners and frequent interlocutors. Writer and critic Gabriela Jauregui and graphic designer Sofia Broid developed the script and catalogue, respectively, for Camil’s 2014 exhibition Entrecortinas: abre, jala, corre at OMR Project Space, Mexico City. Their intimacy with Camil’s work is explicit in the formal and conceptual premises of each of their contributions.

Broid’s design layers graphic and photographic elements onto and over each other in a confusion of figures and spaces in keeping with Camil's own displacement of a perspective centered on individuals or, in recent years, even humanity. Already saturated with sentient-seeming forms, from the tangled tubes of pant legs in Bluejeaneando (2022/23) to the recycled newspaper pulp monoliths reminiscent of termite mounds in Nidos (2021), the book’s spreads heighten a perspectival complexity in simultaneous views of works installed in placeless gallery interiors and at chaotic urban sites. The image selection sets Camil’s community of participants and collaborators at center stage in accumulated candid portraits and even, strangely enough, in the handwritten additions to contribution agreements for works such as A Pot for a Latch (2016/2017/2022/2023).

Jauregui’s preface, titled “Eyemask” for something that comes “before the face,” dances playfully around ideas central to Camil’s conceptualization of her own practice: intuition and interspecies attunement, slippages and self-perception, embodied and material erotics, performance and display. Set in a humorously large font, Jauregui’s words are intervened by images, the letters layering over an irregular grid of landscape and portrait photographs. Documenting hazard tape and retail displays, rear-view windows and billboards, the photos serially present source images gathered by Camil between 2001 and 2015, an architectural and industrial vocabulary tendered in alphabetical, archival barrage.

Friendly Fires is a sentence with an ellipsis; chronicling the artist’s work as it has taken shape over the past fifteen years, it also hints at new frameworks in formation. In 2020, Camil relocated from the urban center to a rural area southwest of Mexico City, where the cooperative orientation of her practice has transformed her studio into a community center that hosts workshops in indigo dying, sign painting, and syntropic agriculture. The book’s title refers to a studio fire that took place there in May 2023, which, in spite of destroying many works in process and temporarily displacing this burgeoning community, is an event that Camil integrates into the flux and flow of her work and its engagement with a broader system. As part of a natural cyclic regeneration, this moment of leveling opens to new opportunities for invention and regrowth.