1:1 explores the relationship between the gallery and its urban context through the connection of the exhibition space to other pre-existing places in its vicinity. Artists are invited to conceive site-specific works which are conceptually anchored in the occupation of the gallery space and, simultaneously, of another location already hosting its own functions and situated within 500m from the gallery. To grasp the works, visitors go from one place to the other.

These routes take place in Vila Buarque, a fast-changing neighborhood in downtown São Paulo where a great variety of local establishments, services and institutions, coexist with a diversity of classes and social dynamics. Such plurality produces a vast repertoire of forms of appropriation and experience of space, ranging from coexistence to friction between its various agents. These relationships both contribute to the unique features of the neighborhood, while also being symptomatic of broader social, economic, and political processes that structure the city at the macro-scale.

At the scale 1:1 the representation is equivalent to its referent. A wider understating of the notion of 1:1 has increasingly permeated the lexicon of art through practices and projects that explore a more direct and effective action in the ‘real world’ and are less mediated by the structures of the art-system. Such practices do not operate as mere representations or duplications of what would already be characteristic of reality, instead they make the representation paradigm bite its own tail. By creating a correspondence between the art gallery and a series of other locations, the project 1:1 not only fosters an intersection between the artistic proposals and the socio-spatial dynamics of the place, but also speculates about these complex correlations.