1:1 | System-Cinema: Ecstasy & Exercise

About

Ricardo Basbaum correlates the exhibition space with a sequential series of domestic spaces that will change throughout the exhibition. The relationship between these spaces is established through a closed-circuit video camera system that captures images in each location and transmits them in real time from one to the other. The framing of the cameras does not show the entirety of these places, instead it focuses on an object created by the artist, duplicated, and placed in each of the spaces. Both pieces are exactly alike, their forms are familiar and somehow close to the body, but do not directly refer to anything known; they also have a strong tactile appeal that is evidenced by their materiality, inciting touch. Both the individuals at home and in the gallery are invited to freely manipulate the pieces, an action that is captured by the cameras and transmitted live to the other space. In this way, handling the object becomes a performative act in relation to a distant recipient or audience, accompanied by the voyeuristic possibility of observing the action (or lack thereof) performed at the other location.

The transmitted images not only generate a tension between the one who “sees” and the one “being-seen”, the “I” and the “other,” but also intersect two apparently opposing spheres: the private one of the domestic space and the (semi)public sphere of the exhibition space. The dichotomy between public and private is further underlined by the conditions of circulation between both places. Unlike previous editions of the project 1:1 where the visitation of works located outside of the gallery was facilitated by the semi-public character of the establishments in which they were exhibited in, in this edition the possibility of visiting the domestic spaces is not a given and will be mediated by the gallery and established by a continuous negotiation with each of its different residents.

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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”.