INSITE Journal
VIEWPOINTS

VIEWPOINTS is a forum featuring contributions by a diverse group of practitioners that share perspectives on the INSITE Journals’ main themes.

September, 2021

“What activist art does is actually a promiscuous theft of historical or archival possibilities. It digs down into that surplus archive, repurposing aspects of it, sometimes in the process repairing some of these gaps and broken pieces, and it functions in a way that is very much like a kind of mistake or error code in the idea of history itself. So if I was going to say, what is "after history?:", it’s perhaps already present in history proper, and that is the sort of noise function that has been sort of canceled out or is attempted to be canceled”—Greg Sholette.

Pablo Helguera
Artist
August, 2020

"In this encroachment of the unexpected I find it difficult not to retreat. Introspection can be a positive impulse, but it means nothing if it is not turned eventually into action." —Pablo Helguera

Donna Conwell
Curator at the Lucas Artists Residency Program at the Montalvo Arts Centro, California
July, 2020

"Post the coronavirus crisis, when we begin to venture out and travel again, could we imagine a different way of moving around the world and a different sort of art world circuit? I am interested in the idea of the slow residency, where our experience of getting from our place of origin to our destination could be as much a part of our residency experience as being in that new place." —Donna Conwell

Kerry Doyle
Director of the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at The University of Texas, El Paso
June, 2020
Eng

“One of the ideas that keep coming back to me when I think about resilience and social beings is the experience of trauma…And there is a theory of trauma called ‘betrayal trauma theory’ that talks about the fact that trauma is not only terror and fear, but also a social betrayal…The other aspect of trauma that I’ve been thinking a lot about is the concept of trauma as a disruption of meaning, or loss of meaning, and a disruption of the narrative in someone’s life…I think it is about questioning that functionality in our organization and creating new narratives as we move forward, so the thing I see as being resilient is our ability to create these new narratives”

Carles Guerra
Artist, Critic, and Curator
May, 2020
Eng

"Resilience, even though it’s an ugly word, it is the word that points to an urgency, an urgency as I said to come up with a collective pedagogy implying a massive cognitive effort, but an effort that we need to guarantee that will be made possible by connecting each other, by keeping up with these strange new forms of collaboration we must all invent."

Wonne Ickx
Founding Partner of PRODUCTORA, and LIGA. Space for Architecture
April, 2020
Eng

“As an architect, I have a different way of looking at social behaviors, social cohesion, a different, and certainly not an agile, quick and direct way to understand social relationships and evolutions and changes in which human beings relate to each other…I enjoy the slowness, the after-thought, instead of the impulse, the slow reactions, the lack of speed”

Denise Markonish
Senior Curator, MASS MoCA
April, 2020
Eng

"For me, resilience doesn’t feel so different from belief, magic, or wonder – all systems that allow the ineffable to exist in the world, while allowing us to have private and collective experiences simultaneously. I think the poetics of resilience is more important now than ever, not just because we are in the wake of a worldwide pandemic; but because even before this unfathomable moment, the world was in trouble in deeply systematic ways spanning human and planetary rights."

Sara Solaimani
PhD Candidate in Art History Theory and Criticism
May, 2020
Eng

"Collective resilience takes precedence in this context over individual resilience, resilience that’s not defined by the individual. I think that resilience of the mind, heart and the spirit are that internal resilience also as opposed to physical or bodily resilience will take precedence in those peoples life’s who are afforded the privilege to quarantine or isolated at home who have access to technology where as physical or bodily resilience there’s going to be more present and urgent in the life’s of people who are for example essential workers."