INSITE LAB is a platform for instigating conversations and experiences about artistic research outside of the academic environment—a laboratory where artists come together with specialists from diverse disciplines to reimagine both sides of the border (San Diego, USA – Baja California, MX).
This binational, bilingual program, unique in the region, focused on the potential of exchange and dialogue as mechanisms for artistic research and experimentation through tours, residencies, and curatorial workshops in varied locations.
Between December 2022 and May 2024, the nine participants met with specialists in contemporary dance, design, conservationism, gastronomy, astronomy, goldsmithing, anthropology, oenology, art criticism, sociology, and mycology. In each of these sessions, the interlocutors gave talks and led workshops and activities related to their professions.
In addition to these trips throughout the region every two weeks, the LAB included two workshops and one residency focused on the artists’ practices. Through collective drawing and writing, talks, readings, and oral presentations, each of the participants traced a genealogy of their ideas and creative processes.
This exhibit is the culmination of the two-year experience. It brings together the participating artists’ proposals, which directly or tangentially connect with the contents of the INSITE LAB. Likewise, it aims to reflect the nature and objects of this project, taking BEST PRACTICE’s space as a place not only for exhibiting artworks and creative processes under development, but also for the exchange of ideas and public participation.
The proposals are based on conversation, exchange, writing, and graphic experimentation. Some are directly inspired by the INSITE LAB’s specific trips and tours, while others adopt a discursive and collaborative stance, which represents an alternative way of undertaking other conversations about art and research in the public sphere.