Tendedero

Brenda Isabel Pérez and Israel Espin are multidisciplinarily inclined architects collaborating here to accomplish the most difficult of tasks: to make something simple enough to really resonate. They conceived Tendedero (Clothesline) for the terrace to weave Casa Wabi into Mexico City’s domestic landscape of rooftops, revealing this collective space as one of the city’s most charged and juxtapositional social stages: a site of domestic refuge and universal conjunction.

Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018), which features an iconic rooftop scene, was a revelatory crash course in how to use the setting of a city to engage the whole fabric of a society. In that scene Cleo, the domestic worker who is the film’s protagonist, does the washing on the roof while playing cowboys and Indians with the family’s youngest son. Surrounded by the family’s laundry, hanging around them like so many ghosts, they lie head to head on a raised skylight and talk. Everything seems to be quietly at stake. The scene ends with a slow pan up away from Cleo and Pepe and out over the city: the family’s washing joining a whole skyline of clotheslines encompassing a poetic everywhere.

Pérez and Espin are interested in the more ineffable aspects of our built environment as critical infrastructure in the social fabric. Purposefully blending tropes associated with different space making disciplines: architectural, artistic, and urban, they conceived Clothesline to be “both a testimony and a provocation, showing how art can transform elements of the domestic sphere into tools for social critique and collective construction.” The best way to think about this public exploration of hanging the city’s laundry out: to dry, and get wet, and dirty, and clean, over and over again, they suggest, is as a series of filters or boundaries that affect the liminal psychic spaces where what we see and experience becomes inseparable from what we believe and who we are.

Dakin Hart