From mid-May to mid-October 2026, the outdoor courtyard of Galeria Municipal hosts a new work by Mexican artist Pia Camil, renown for large-scale works developed in collaboration with local communities. Created from second-hand clothing collected with Porto residents, Sharing designs a place the public can observe and inhabit.

Reflecting Pia Camil’s research into collaborative practices, the installation “Sharing” sits at the crossroads between artwork and playful space. It addresses themes such as the world of the textile industry and how it functions as a repository of cultural information and a portrait of collective consciousness.

Pia Camil’s multidisciplinary work, unfolding across painting, sculpture, performance, and large-scale installations, develops between Acatitlán and Mexico City. It explores how art can create alternative spaces for reflection and shared experience. Informed by feminist and anti-capitalist perspectives, her practice frequently incorporates audience participation and community-building activities, as well as the repurposing of materials, to address the contradictions inherent in patriarchal and capitalist legacies.

Photography: Inês Aleixo

Bara, Bara, Bara is a large-scale textile installation composed of T-shirts purchased at street markets in Iztapalapa, Mexico City. These garments, originally manufactured in Latin America for distribution in the United States, return south through informal channels, reappearing as secondhand merchandise in popular markets. Camil deconstructs these T-shirts and sews them together to form expansive textile assemblages that evoke both the visual aesthetic and the performative nature of the markets where they were found. The installation is inspired by Lygia Pape’s iconic performance Divisor (1968), in which a group of people walked together through a large sheet of fabric, their heads emerging as a form of collective action in public space. By referencing this historic work, Camil prompts reflections on individual identity in relation to the collective, while also addressing themes such as transnational trade, migration, consumption, and forms of emotional exchange in contemporary urban contexts.

The urgency of responding to ecological, economic, and institutional crises—each reaching critical intensity in recent years—has prompted many artists to explore alternatives to the exhausting, extractive, and unsustainable systems of life and labour that we are often tempted to accept, and which constrain our collective imagination.

The artists featured in the exhibition draw inspiration from the margins and interstices of the everyday, devising new ways of being in the world. They focus on ordinary tools and objects, which they reclaim and repurpose; on fragile, unstable materials; on precarious situations and shifting spaces; and on undervalued forms of labour. Their work renders tangible the multiple, unstable, and entangled worlds that people continue to quietly craft together.

Collecting, recycling, reusing, transforming, collaborating, repairing, borrowing, hacking, investigating—these are just some of the methodologies that inform and sustain their practices. Driven by both a desire for autonomy and a clear-eyed realism, the invited artists engage in forms of creative improvisation—"ways of doing"—that allow them to reclaim the goods, tools, and spaces that shape their lives. Across a wide range of formal expressions, the idea of transformation—of materials, tools, and uses—emerges as a central concern.

Borrowing its title from the unclassifiable figure of Michel de Certeau—priest, philosopher, and historian—the exhibition The Practice of Everyday Life is conceived, designed, and produced in close dialogue with its subject matter. The Capc museum and the city of Bordeaux are approached here as grounds for experimentation, open to the most diverse collaborations—from institutional networks to artist-run initiatives—generating shared experiences with the public, and gathering and reusing materials from the cultural and urban fabric.

This exhibition amplifies the voices of artists who are also researchers—seeking out singular, inventive, secret, and sovereign forms of joy. In doing so, it aims to become what the American essayist bell hooks once described as “a space of encouragement.”

Artists : Wilfrid Almendra, Francis Alÿs, Bibliomania (Alex Balgiu & Olivier Lebrun), Andrea Bowers, Pia Camil, Jennifer Caubet, Ruth Ewan, Cao Fei, Gina Folly, Birke Gorm, Shilpa Gupta, Ane Hjort Guttu & Sveinung Unneland, Oliver Hardt, Adelita Husni-Bey, Judith Kakon, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Klara Lidén, Maider López, Enzo Mari, Jean-Luc Moulène, Yuko Mohri, Moffat Takadiwa, Daniel Otero Torres, Anri Sala, Marinella Senatore, Ettore Sottsass, Tenant of Culture, Naama Tsabar.

Curator: Sandra Patron
assisted by Marie-Inès Tirard

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The Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil presents “Fuego amigo“, Pia Camil’s first survey exhibition at a Mexican institution. The exhibition presents works from 2001 to the present, spanning various media from drawing and sculpture to installation and performance.

Fuego amigo proposes a circular revision without a beginning. The main structure is held together by the remains of her studio’s fire emulating the alchemic practice of lead transforming into gold. Prior to installation, the museum gallery was being renovated and the ‘bare’ plywood walls appeared behind the white walls. It was then decided to stop the remodeling and reveal what lies beneath, exposing the process of transformation. The work therefore is showcased on bare walls and self-standing modules made from repurposed and burnt wood.

Pia Camil’s work emerges from engaging in forms of commerce that operate outside the confines of capitalism. This process is nourished by the observation of the social and economic failure of the neo-colonial model, instrumentalized by trade agreements and the unrestrained forces of the free market. The artist draws inspiration from the heterogeneous peri-capitalist models that surface from necessity and precariousness. She locates and exposes them, without romanticism, to highlight the hardships and to propose alternate possibilities that communities have found. In this way, she practices a form of urban anthropology.

A few years ago, Camil and her family relocated from Mexico City to a semi-rural community in Mexico – seeking another way of life, one that diverged from the discourses, rules and productivity-focused schedules imposed by capitalism in every major city.

– Mauricio Marcin, Curator