A 70-metre long clothes line featuring oversized clothes has just been erected in in a major pedestrian area of Santiago, right in front of the Chilean President’s palace.
Tendedero is the Glue Society’s contribution to South America’s Hecho en Casa [Home Made] festival.
The Glue Society was commissioned by the festival, which is created by local company, Bla! and sponsored by telecom company, Entel. The festival has been running for 5 years, bringing public installations created by international and local artists to the city.
“It gave us the opportunity to provocatively bring humanity into an urban environment. Most of our work has one degree of disorientation, and in this instance, we used scale and form to re-inforce the importance of traditional everyday life in modern times,” The Glue Society commented.
The clothes line was created by Henry Curchod and Jonathan Kneebone and is situated in Paseo Bulnes, a major thoroughfare which features government buildings from the 1930s which gives the work an added presence.
“Being asked to create something of significant scale in a South American city is not the kind of project you get to produce every day,” The Glue Society noted.
The artwork took more than six months to make and involved collaboration between a team of 15 in Chile and The Glue Society in Australia.
A team of 2 seamstresses and 4 assistants worked over 3 months to construct the pieces to plans designed by The Glue Society – to a 14:1 scale. The heaviest item (the long sleeved t-shirt) weighs 60kg – with the full line of clothes estimated at 350kg.
During the three-night installation, the crew grew to a team of 35 – including 8 aerial engineers.
One of the greatest challenges was to get the work to behave as an ordinary-sized clothes line would – whatever the weather, including through wind or rain.
At various intervals throughout the day, the clothes line also hides a 200-litre water system which soaks the clothes, so they drip on the public below, until the wind dries them off to float freely in the spring breeze of the city.
As well as The Glue Society, this year’s featured artists at the Hecho en Casa Festival include Florentijn Hofman from Holland and Chile’s renowned mural artist, Luis Nunez San Martin.
The festival runs from September 28 to October 8 2017 across Santiago.
