COMMONPLACES
A platform for producing work with curators, artists, and communities, working locally in different regions of the world.
Commonplaces is a platform for producing work with curators, artists, and communities, working locally in different regions of the world. To date, curatorial projects have been developed in Lima, Peru, Johannesburg, South Africa, and the binational area of San Diego County and Baja California, US/Mexico. Several questions were central as INSITE reimagined its format: What if curators and artists didn't travel to INSITE’s physical base for periodic editions, but instead were invited to immerse themselves in their own places of origin or residence? What narratives and microhistories might emerge as projects unfold at their own pace and rhythm in these disparate geographies? What mechanisms might INSITE employ to make visible, disseminate, and provoke a broader dialogue about the knowledge gained through the projects?
For Commonplaces, each editor-curator conceived a context-specific theme from which to develop a project through three components: first, as curator of long-term Commissions with artists to develop new work rooted in that place; then, as guest editor of an online and printed issue of the INSITE Journal that includes contributions from writers, artists, and scholars responding to the project's theme, documentation of the artists’ commissions, perspectives from fellow curators, and selected extant texts; and third, as organizer of Conversations to be presented both live and recorded.
Miguel A. López’s project, Common Thread, was centered on a collaboration with a Shipibo-Konibo group of women artists from the Cantagallo community in Lima, Peru, who spent a year creating new textiles and paintings about their experiences during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. The sixth edition of the INSITE Journal (2023) focused on Lopez’s project and included texts by Peruvian anthropologists and theorists who explore the context of Indigenous art, language, and cosmology and its socio-political implications.
Gabi Ngcobo’s project, Reverse Forward and All at Once, was developed through two commissions with South African artists Nolan Oswald Dennis and Nyakallo Maleke, who explored the concept of thinking in reverse through language, geology, and an expanded concept of drawing that seeks to reimagine physical, social, and political places of knowledge. The project’s first public exhibition took place in May 2022 as a work-in-progress installation at the Javett Art Centre (University of Pretoria), where both artists developed an installation that evolved over time through interventions, collaborations, and performance. The project has since been shown in Rotterdam, New York, and London, and will be on view in San Diego from October 25, 2025 through January 17, 2026.
Andrea Torreblanca’s project, The Sedimentary Effect, runs from 2021 to 2027 and includes three chapters that explore contemporary perceptions of phenomena, architecture, and spirituality through microhistories of the San Diego County-Baja California US/MX region. The first chapter, “A Timeless Way of Building,” exploring architect Christopher Alexander’s Mexicali Experimental Project, culminated in 2025 with an exhibition and series of Conversations that took place in both San Diego and Mexicali, a Commission by Mexicali-based artist Pastizal Zamudio, several multiday events and expeditions, and the seventh edition of the INSITE Journal (2025). The following chapters, “Erratic Fields” and “The Spiritual Realm,” are currently in progress.