It's fun, interactive and colourful, and brightens up even the dullest of grey
Glasgow days.
There is a serious message behind the patchworks of hundreds of Mexican T-shirts, painstakingly sewn together to create an art installation, but your first
reaction is simply to marvel at the colours.
On the south side of Glasgow, Tramway is adding a new, vibrant flavour to spring by hosting Bara, Bara, Bara, the first solo exhibition in Scotland by the Mexican artist Pia Camil.
Her seven giant hanging installations are made up of around 350 T-shirts, bright and vivid and stitched together by hand.
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All were acquired from the street markets of Iztapalapa in Mexico City.
There’s also a piece on the gallery’s floor made up of second-hand jeans, titled
Bluejeaneando. Everywhere you look colour flies out at you, and visitors to the first week of the show laugh and smile.
You are invited to interact with the supersized pieces by poking your head through the numerous holes, which are intended to give the works an immersive feel.
It’s surreal and captivating. Children shriek and giggle in delight, while adults smile from ear to ear at the joy of it all.
Yet beneath the creativity and skill of the installation, behind the banter and
wriggling figures of people interacting with the art, is a more serious story.
Camil, 39, deconstructed the T-shirts before sewing them together to create swathes of fused fabric to replicate the market tarpaulins, which are suspended from Tramway’s roof.
The name of the exhibition derives from the cries of Mexico City street vendors – bara is an abbreviation of barato, which means cheap. The vendors shout it to draw attention to the low-cost goods they tout.
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The T-shirts and jeans were originally manufactured in Latin America by
companies headquartered in the United States, before finding their way back to the bargain markets of Mexico City.
Through Bara, Bara, Bara and its patchworks of Mexican street styles and varying fashions, Camil wishes to draw attention to global trade routes and inequalities in Mexican society.
The exhibition will run at the Tramway in Glasgow until June 23.
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