1:1 | Assisted Reproduction

About

João Loureiro correlates the gallery’s exhibition space with a butcher’s shop in a supermarket called Futurama. Rather than occupying both spaces with a set of works, Loureiro conceives a series of linked actions that are cyclically repeated throughout the exhibition period and which cumulatively constitutes the work, day-after-day.

Futurama’s exhibitors are practically empty, which gives the impression that, at any moment, the supermarket can irreversibly shut down, following the fate of some its other branches. Last year, the General Attorney of the State of São Paulo blocked part of the billing of this supermarket chain, as it is under investigation for misappropriation of money. In the butcher shop of the supermarket, a freezer cabinet contains several sculptures made with ground beef. The sculptures are small-scale reproductions of the artwork “Two-Piece Reclining Figure: Points” (1969-1970) by Henry Moore (1898-1986). Once a week, one of these sculptures is placed alongside the other meats in the main refrigerated display case. Then it is transported to a captive breeding of houseflies where it becomes food for these insects. Once a week, the artist goes to the butcher’s shop and collects the dead flies from the insect light trap just above the meat’s showcase. The flies’ carcasses are taken to the exhibition space and are stuck, with entomological pins, in a styrofoam sculpture, a full-scale reproduction of the work “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space” (1913) from the Italian artist Umberto Boccioni’s (1882-1916). Throughout the exhibition period the same processes are repeated and the styrofoam sculpture accumulates more dead flies.

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1:1 explores the relationship between the gallery and its urban context through the connection among the exhibition space and other pre-existing places in its vicinity. In each of the project’s editions, an artist is invited to conceive a bipartite work, which occupies an exhibition room in the gallery and, simultaneously, a second space within the neighborhood. This other location, which already hosts its own uses and functions, is chosen by the artist and situated at a walkable distance from the gallery. Thus, to understand the totality of the works, the public will have to go from the exhibition room to a certain place in the neighborhood or vice versa.

These routes will take place in the region of Vila Buarque and surroundings, downtown São Paulo, an area where a great variety of local establishments, services, institutions and others,  intersect with a diversity of classes and social dynamics. Such plurality produces a vast repertoire of forms of appropriation and experience of space ranging from the coexistence to the friction between its various agents, such as the civil initiative, the public policy, the private speculation or others. If these networks of relationships contribute to the unique character of the neighborhood, they are also symptomatic of broader social, economic, and political processes that structure the city at the macro-scale.

By creating a correspondence between the art gallery and a series of other locations within its surroundings, the project not only intends to potentiate an intersection between the artistic proposals and the socio-spatial dynamics of the place, but also to speculate about this correlation. If proposing a succession of works to the exterior of the exhibition space could enable a more effective performance beyond the codified structures of the art system, on the other hand, being outside the “white cube” has never been more within the artistic structure. If art is increasingly dissolving into social praxis, on the other hand, it is reaching unprecedented degrees of institutionalization and commercialization. Therefore, the reciprocity between the gallery and another space of the “real” will serve both as a precondition for the artists’ process and as a basis for a critical reflection on the specificities, potentialities and paradoxes of a state of art that, in its discourse and/or performance, is at 1:1 with “reality”.