The Glue Society creates 75-metre clothes line for Entel’s Hecho en Casa Festival in Santiago, Chile

The Glue Society has just unveiled its latest piece of public art – a 75-metre long clothes line featuring oversized clothes – for South America’s largest urban arts festival in Santiago, Chile.

The work was a commission from Entel’s Hecho en Casa (‘Home-Made’) Festival, which each year features five large-scale public installations created by international and local artists to the city.

This new work follows a line of public art and sculpture by the Sydney-based collective – in this instance the work being created by Henry Curchod and Jonathan Kneebone.

The team says: “We wanted to make something which challenged the move to technology by bringing something very traditional and human to the urban environment.”

The project was more than six months in the making – with a team of six sewing the clothes designed by the artists to a 14:1 scale. During the three night installation, the crew grew to 35 – including 8 aerial engineers – ensuring the 80-metre clothes line could handle the worst of Santiago’s weather.

The clothes were designed to have a traditional colour palette and were specifically weighted to move in the wind as an ordinary-sized clothes line would. At various intervals throughout each day, a 200-litre water system soaked the clothes, so they dripped on the public below, creating added interaction with the work.

As well as The Glue Society, this year’s featured artists at the Hecho en Casa Festival included Holland’s Florentijn Hofman and Chile’s renowned mural artist, Luis Nunez San Martin.