Artists Brenda Isabel Pérez and Israel Espin have created a powerful installation called "Tendedero" (Clothesline) that transforms the simple domestic act of hanging laundry into an architectural and artistic statement. The large-scale installation is located on the rooftop of Casa Wabi Sabino in Mexico City's Atlampa neighborhood, where it serves as both an urban intervention and a social critique of often-overlooked domestic labor.
The installation features a carefully designed structural system consisting of four parallel metal cables stretched across the rooftop and anchored with steel counterweights. Twelve linen canvases, each measuring 2.5 by 1.5 meters, are suspended from these lines, creating a dynamic interplay between the rigid steel structure and the lightweight, semi-transparent fabric. As the canvases respond to wind and movement, they create shifting spatial thresholds that visitors can walk through and experience.
By occupying the rooftop space, the project deliberately reclaims a transitional zone that has historically been associated with domestic labor and care work, activities often performed by women and largely overlooked within urban planning and economic frameworks. Through its spatial configuration, Tendedero makes this traditionally invisible labor visible, positioning it within both architectural discourse and collective urban experience.
The installation works in harmony with architect Alberto Kalach's design for Casa Wabi Sabino, complementing the building's structural clarity while introducing new layers of permeability and rhythm. The linen surfaces generate ephemeral enclosures that produce alternating moments of transparency and opacity, continuously altering visitors' perspective and sense of scale as they move through the space.
The experience of walking among the suspended fabrics evokes both the repetitive nature of daily domestic work and its deeper metaphorical dimensions, connecting to cycles of care, repair, and renewal that sustain what the artists describe as the "social fabric." By enlarging the scale of an everyday household object, the clothesline is transformed from a simple utility into an inhabitable architectural structure.
This transformation serves a larger purpose of repositioning domestic space as a critical territorial concept through which cities are shaped and social relationships are negotiated. Through the Tendedero installation, artists Espin and Pérez explore the complex intersection of art, architecture, and urbanism, proposing that society should reconsider dwelling and domestic labor as integral components of the city's cultural and material fabric.
