The project SITU, developed by Galeria Leme and curated by Bruno de Almeida, is a platform of production and artistic research that promotes a discussion about the potential of a dialogue between art, architecture and the city, inquiring what are its possible reverberations and contributions to a broader questioning of contemporary urbanity as a physical-social matrix.

This project invites a number of Latin American artists to, one after the other, take hold of the external spaces of Galeria Leme’s building, devising temporary and site-specific works, which relate both to the building and to the adjoining public space.

The choice of this gallery (a project commissioned to the Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Pritzker Prize 2006) relates not only to its double bond with the art and architecture world, but primarily to its strong architectural features and also to its complex history of construction, demolition, replication and expansion, which can be taken as a representation, on a small scale, of the evolutionary processes of São Paulo and of many other contemporary metropolises.

The curatorial focus falls upon artists whose researches gravitate around architectural and urban space issues, as well as other tangential topics. In addition, there is an emphasis on Latin American artists, as they have another bodily and intellectual spatial understanding that comes from an intense familiarity with the complexity of the public sphere and of the urban and social processes which are specific to Latin America.

By chaining a disparate series of artistic proposals that dialogue directly with the public space, SITU intends to continuously engage and incite a broader and more heterogeneous audience. The main purpose is to conceive works that are not innocuous representations of reality, but rather elements that engender critical spatial conditions of an ethical-aesthetical commitment, through which pressing issues can be formulated, discussed and propagated.