Pia Camil: “Friendly Fires” Book Launch

On the occasion of Gallery Weekend Los Angeles, BLUM presents a book launch celebrating the first monograph dedicated to the practice of Mexico City-based artist Pia Camil. Friendly Fires combines exhibition documentation with material from the artist’s personal archive to explore thirty-two projects from 2006 to now. Join us for music, refreshments, and an artist talk with Camil and Cesar Garcia, founder, director, and chief curator of The Mistake Room, Los Angeles.

As the title suggests, Camil’s work is often done in a climate where kinship and the affective are proposed as a radical way of working in contrast to the highly individualized world. The three illustrated essays delve into this and the artist's oeuvre. Justine Ludwig explores the capitalist critique in the artists’ overall practice; Karen Cordero looks through cloth as a surrogate body to press on the material significance of Camil’s pieces; Cecilia Fajardo-Hill considers the work from a feminist and Latin American perspective, and Elise Lammer and Camil discuss the importance of participatory and collective practices in a multispecies world. The book was designed in collaboration between the artist and Mexican designer Sofia Broid and includes an addendum presented as a poetic visual essay by Gabriela Jauregui. With English and Spanish texts, this book makes Camil’s important contribution to feminist and Latin American practices in the context of late capitalism accessible to a wider audience.