The Leme Gallery has the pleasure of presenting the first individual exhibition by Vivian Caccuri in São Paulo. Under the title "Condominium," the artist, who has for three years organized the monthly performance "Silent Walk" – an urban expedition organized so that 20 people take a vow of silence for eight hours while wandering through different sites throughout the city – will present sculptures, installations, and drawings from May 6 to June 13, 2015.

In "Condominium," Caccuri shows four different series of new works, making use of technology, as in both series "Goodbye" and "Bias" to reflect on the permeability – often curtailed – between public space and private space. The sculpture "Goodbye," a mini soundsystem from the early 2000s, was modified in partnership with engineers in order to tune to different radio stations simultaneously and react to the circulating visitors in the exhibition space. In "Bias," Caccuri collected hundreds of pedestrians' portraits in downtown Rio de Janeiro so as to subvert one of the first technologies of facial recognition, called "Eigenface." This system, which creates a kind of "fingerprint" from different photographs of a person's face, was used to compose a phantasmagoric blot of the one hundred people photographed on the street. From the digital image, Caccuri produced drawings in charcoal on paper.

The series "Pagode" is a kind of tapestry inside out, where the protective membranes from construction sites, such as the signs and protective screens, are shredded and transformed into large geometric designs. The ends are loose and hold broken glass or aluminum bars, which gives them movement and sound when moved by the observer. Another work that can be manipulated in the exhibition is the series "My Mistake," made from keys discarded by locksmiths from downtown São Paulo due to mistakes while cutting or because the locks were changed. The keys are hung directly on the concrete walls in the shape of graphs from economic and opinion-based research. The keys, when played with by the public, produce a sharp, bright sound in the gallery's space.

The materials, shapes, places, and dynamics of "Condominium" are part of the research for "Silent Walk." While Caccuri researches the locations for the wandering in silence, she encounters people, objects, and situations that cumulatively become elements for projects such as those in the exhibition. Thus, since it already happens in the walks, "Condominium" redirects the visitor's physical presence, reflecting upon the role of intimacy and integration of differences (or the exclusion of both) in the constitution of public space: is the Brazilian material world undergoing a process of condominiumification?

Vivian Caccuri, São Paulo, Brazil, 1986. Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her work creates relations between sound phenomena, public space, privacy and identification systems, voice and imagination through performances, objects, drawings, and installations. At Princeton University, she wrote the book "What I do is Music" (2012), published by 7Letras and was awarded the Funarte Critical Production Prize in Music in 2013. She was awarded the Sergio Motta Prize in 2011 and the Itaú Cultural Directions Award in 2008. Her main exhibitions include the 33rd Panorama of Brazilian Art at the MAMSP, VERBO 2012 and 2013 at Galeria Vermelho, Brasil ARTEMUSICA at the Zacheta National Gallery in Warsaw, Poland and TRO-PI-CAL in Akershus Center in Oslo, Norway. She is represented by Leme Gallery in Sao Paulo.

Silent Walk

Silent Walk is the itinerary of an eight-hour urban tour for fifteen to twenty people organized by artist Vivian Caccuri. The journey is carried out under a vow of silence and takes the participants to places that have special acoustic activity as well as activities that can be observed. Buildings and constructions that shelter contrasting sounds, acoustic problems, terraces, isolated neighborhoods, archives, and religious spaces are some examples of places through which the group traverses. Throughout the day the silence and constant change of environments stimulates the participants to perceive and incorporate relationships between architecture, privacy, property, and intimacy. The tour may encounter situations in which one more easily sees the relationship between architecture, privacy, property, and intimacy. At the end of the route, the participants may return to speaking at a specially prepared dinner during which the participants share their impressions and hear the voices of the others for the first time. The project has visited rarely accessed places like the helipad and presidential room at the BNDES in Rio de Janeiro, the cloister at the St. Benedict Monastery in São Paulo, the basement of the Rio MAM, the famous concert hall "Finlandia" in Helsinki which opened specially for the group, among many others. The project has been performed more than twenty times in cities such as Rio de Janeiro, Niterói, Valparaiso (Chile), Riga (Latvia), Helsinki (Finland), and Sao Paulo and was developed in artistic residences such as CAPACETE in Rio (2012), Pivô in São Paulo (2014) and Sound Development City (2014) in the Baltic Countries.