The process through which inSite_05 took shape began in spring 2003 with initial residencies for small groups of invited artists that were punctuated with formal and informal dialogs, talks, and meetings with key members of the San Diego/Tijuana community. inSite_05 maintained the central focus of INSITE as commissioning artists to make new work in the context of research-intensive residencies in the region. At the same time, this fifth version expanded the breadth and number of disciplines and participants through the development of four interrelated components:

Interventions: The heart of inSite_05 was twenty-two artistic “interventions” in the social fabric of the San Diego/Tijuana region with an emphasis on projects that were conceived as platforms to create situations through the active collaboration of artists and communities.

Scenarios: Scenarios examined practices involved with the public domain that transcend urban spatial locations. Focusing on time-based considerations and the removal of the physical object as a support, these three projects dealt with then less established artistic practices (online art, sound and image, and archive) as keys to the construction of the public sphere as a space of live discourse. Scenarios refers to processes that parody common models for consuming, distributing, exhibiting, and storing cultural information.

Conversations: Envisioned as working sessions centered around questions pertinent to the terrain of San Diego/Tijuana, the inSite_05 Conversations have been conceived to rethink issues of local import within a broader frame. Conversations continues to broaden its role as a forum for debate and theoretical reflection through a two-year public program of lectures, workshops, and dialogues involving practitioners from a variety of fields.

Farsites: This was a two-city museum exhibition jointly produced by the Centro Cultural Tijuana and the San Diego Museum of Art that brought together the work of fifty-three contemporary artists, documentary material, and artifacts from five urban centers in the Americas—Buenos Aires, Caracas, Mexico City, New York City, and São Paulo. The exhibition sought to explore contemporary art’s engagement with urban and domestic symptoms of crisis in the city.

The public phase of inSite_05 lasted for approximately three months in the fall of 2005. Rather than being conceived as an exhibition that the public might view or tour, the public phase was framed more as moments (almost always a fragment of a significantly longer, closed artistic process) open to experience and, in many cases, participation.

"Every city receives its form from the desert that it opposes."
Italo Calvino

With some exceptions, artistic interventions in urban or suburban public spaces tend to be reduced to over-signified representations of the City and its contextual icons. They derive their supposed radicalism as “public art” from the critical discursive potential that underlies the overall failure of the modern urban project and, consequently, the failure of the paradigm of citizenship.

A border zone like the San Diego/Tijuana con-urban region would seem predestined as a site for shared contemporary representations of the urban context. This may be due to its postmodern versatility in providing a plethora of cultural symbols that art is able to employ to hyperbolize or conceal discourses on globalization and the politics of coexistence. San Diego/Tijuana, as transnational scenography, could provide an attractive, stylish display: the City as the theme of high design—in urbanism, in architecture, and in habitat—whose axis is the consumption of lifestyles. From this currently dominant perspective, the city is (re)presented as spatiality and formalized to the point that it becomes an overblown substitute for a modern artistic strategy: the regressive fusion of the “white cube” and the esthetic artifact. inSite_05 will attempt to avoid such urban paradigms.

inSite_05 attempts to envision the city as a social fabric whose survival is dependent upon its flows. As a result, it strives to stimulate novel experiences of public domain and the implementation of alternate modes of citizenship and interconnectedness. inSite_05 will work toward these ends from an interdisciplinary operational platform—based on critical models borrowed from an assortment of research fields and strategic approaches —in order to modify the prevailing ordering of urban meanings.

inSite_05's artistic essence will reside primarily in recovering the power of particular heuristic strategies, in particular game playing and fictional narratives, that have historically been approached through art and which still constitute what we understand as artistic. These strategies include esthetic representations, market surveys, environmental experimentation, the dissemination of informational archives, parodies of political events and mass spectacles, models of affiliation and community consensus, records of everyday acts of cultural resistance, and so on. Even at the risk of fracturing INSITE’s ability to act as a cultural event that serves to legitimize artistic careers, the overarching challenge for inSite_05 is to empower each project to suborn and de-institutionalize these dominant artistic models and their component strategies of political legitimization. The aim is to reinscribe artistic practice as innovative and creative experiences. By means of critical processes and delineating climaxes that involve coparticipating individuals, inSite_05 will seek to make tangible the experience of “public” as a coming together of social subjects. Only in this way can we contribute new channels for the cultural flows that now converge via myriad streambeds to make up the urban social fabric.

Above and beyond the prestige of the artists who will be brought together in this event and the expectations for and repercussions of their work in mediated spaces, inSite_05 will seek to present itself as a connecting topology that links the mobility of urban networks with the procedures and displacements that are driven by the new identities of urban citizenship. inSite_05 involves a project of critical revitalization of the “urban” through minimalist intrusions into the “social,” into the weakest of its flows and into the most obvious of its obstructions. inSite_05 summons artists to instigate situations of flow and intervention, but also to create new utopias of belonging and new dynamics for social representation and public visibility. Projects that by their format and program self-identify as works in progress engender processes aimed at identifying and evaluating the informal, alternate, non-programmatic impulses that permit the survival, coexistence, and evolution of a multitude of identities in constant metamorphosis in cities like San Diego/Tijuana.

inSite_05 seeks to instigate a practice that will avoid the generation of a mere collection of artistic representations about the border context. Instead, it will introduce vital alternative strategies at the very heart of these urban flows.

Osvaldo Sánchez

inSite_05 Participating Institutions
Atheneaum Music and Arts Library
Centro Cultural de la Raza
Centro Cultural Tijuana (CECUT)
Colegio de la Frontera Norte (COLEF)
Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (CONACULTA)
Consulado General de México en San Diego
Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (FONCA)
Goethe Institut Mexiko
Instituto de Cultura de Baja California
Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA)
San Diego Museum of Art
San Diego State University, University Art Gallery
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)
Universidad Iberoamericana Tijuana
Universidad Autónoma de Baja California (UABC)
University of California, San Diego, The Stuart Collection
University of California, San Diego, Department of Visual Arts
United States Embassy, Mexico City
Veterans Museum and Memorial Center, San Diego

Major and Distinguished inSite_05 Sponsors
Amazing Company Pharmacies
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
ArtNexus
Artography: Arts in a Changing America (a grant and documentation program of Leveraging Investments in Creativity, funded by the Ford Foundation)
XVII Ayuntamiento de Tijuana
Fundación BBVA Bancomer
Barbara Borden
Border Billboard
The Burnham Foundation
20th Century Fox Studios
Casas Geo Baja California
The Chula Vista Office of Cultural Arts
The City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture
Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (CONACULTA)
Fundación Cuervo
Editorial Mapas
Escaparate
Estafeta
Estudios Fox Baja
Farmacias Nacional
Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (FONCA)
Jacques and Natasha Gelman Trust
The Gem Foundation
Goethe Institut Mexiko
Hotel Habita
The Bruce T. Halle Family Foundation
Eloisa and Chris Haudenschild
Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA)
International Community Foundation
The James Irvine Foundation
Fundación Jumex
The Lee Foundation
Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam
The Lucille and Ronald Neeley Foundation
The National Endowment for the Arts
The Peter Norton Family Foundation
Panta Rhea Foundation
The San Diego Foundation
The San Diego Union-Tribune
Fundación Televisa
Seltzer Caplan McMahon Vitek
Tides Canada Foundation
Union Bank of California
United States Embassy in Mexico City
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)

Executive Directors
Michael Krichman, Executive Director/US
Carmen Cuenca, Executive Director/MX

Curatorial
Osvaldo Sánchez, Artistic Director
Donna Conwell, Curator
Tania Ragasol, Curator

Administration
Danielle Reo, Director of Finance
Maryann Moore, Administrative Director
Joy Decena, Office Manager and Administrator
Sarah Haughton, Office Manager

Production
Daniel Martínez, General Production Manager
Margara de León, Production Manager in Tijuana
Joy Decena, Production Researcher
Esmeralda Ceballos, Production Coordinator in Tijuana
Zlatan Vukosavljevic, Production Coordinator in San Diego

Documentation and Web Coordinators
Moriah Ulinskas
Nick Hutchinson

Communications
Papus Von Saenger, Public Relations Coordinator
Selene Preciado, Institutional Liasions Assistant
José Manuel Cruz Vázquez, Designer-at-Large
Sirak Peralta, Graphic Designer

The following also formed part of the team at different moments:
Merete Kjaer, Michael Golino, and Marcela Quiroz

Curators of Components

Adriano Pedrosa, Farsites
Sally Yard, Conversations
Mark Tribe, Tijuana Calling
Ute Meta Bauer, Movil_Transborder Archive
Hans Fjellestad, Ellipsis

Interlocutors

(Interventions)
Beverly Adams
Ruth Auberbach
Joshua Decter
Kelly Jones
Francesco Pellizi

Adjunct Curators (Farsites)

Santiago García Navarro
Julieta González
Betti Sue Hertz
Ana Elena Mallet
Carla Zaccagnini

Julie Dunn, Editor
Barbara Metz, Director of Public Relations
Yolanda Walther Meade, Simultaneous Translation

President of the Board
Eloisa Haudenschild

Board of Directors
Barbara Borden
Cathe Burnham
Luis Cabrera
Dolores Cuenca
Mario Espinosa
Gerardo Estrada
Rosella Fimbres
Peter Goulds
Aimée Labarrère de Servitje
Eugenio López Alonso
Karen Mercaldo
Alejandro Moreno
Lucille Neeley
Randy Robbins (Treasurer)
Hans Schoepflin
Bernd Scherer
Teresa Vicencio
Víctor Vilaplana