Andrea Torreblanca
I was thinking that to begin this conversation, it would be important to frame how INSITE was invited to be part of your Normal Exceptions: Contemporary Art in Mexico exhibition (2021) at the Museo Jumex, and how your interest in the idea of microhistory was the point of departure for me to think about Speech Acts and the INSITE Archive.

Kit Hammonds
The invitation was quite loose, and the reference to microhistory was also a bit loose. But one of the purposes was to try to open up curating a large show to other voices. And that, in itself, was a kind of micro historical approach—to work with you on something more exploratory within the framework of a larger exhibition, and explore a curatorial practice, which is not exhibition making as such, but is investigative.

AT
This was interesting for me to reflect on how archives work, and how they contain so much power, knowledge, and memory. But also, about trying to find what had been said in the past, and how these words are saying something in the present. How to confront memory not as a new microhistory, but just by piecing together new questions that could be relevant through the many voices that have been part of INSITE's thirty-year history.

KH
So, that narrative, your own narrative of how you were going about that, lent itself very well to being a more artistic presentation in the museum, something that was acted rather than displayed. In an exhibition scenario, there's is a level of spectacle one wants to bring, because it's for a wide public, as well as a specialist one. How one can take research and not necessarily show it as research, but rather show it as theatre or as a creative possibility is interesting. It all goes towards that idea of an act rather than an explanation. I mean, in a very linguistic sense, of speech acts as things that don't fall within the world of explanation.

AT
Absolutely. How can language do something for a listener, and for a public? When working on Speech Acts, I was remembering Susan Sontag, and how during her acceptance speech for the Jerusalem prize, she spoke of words as being arrows; she described them in a way that they can be caves or places to dwell in. And during the moment of the performance, words were relevant, but also physicality.

KH
One of the texts [from the Speech Acts performance] that always stuck in my mind, perhaps the most contemporary and present at that time, was about the politics of breathing (Julia Bryan-Wilson, INSITE Journal_03). That's a great text for binding together a series of almost coincidental cultural moments that proved very significant from the protests, to breathe or not with a mask in the pandemic. And then also being able to reflect on the privilege that brings, that not everybody has those privileges. So even within the gallery space, as we were all masked up except for the dancers whose own breathing is so important, it became a very interesting mirror of the moment. And for me, that was a formative speech act. Going in and being reminded in the moment of where you were, and the privileges you had to be there in
the first place.

AT
I agree, and one of the intentions of Speech Acts was to think about the many ways in which language enters your body. The texts were recorded through many voices, a selection of words was written on the wall, and the script was enacted. So, for me, the confrontation with language had to be reinforced all over. In terms of what you say about privilege, speaking about political action inside a museum always feels very small or very elusive, cynical, and privileged. But if as an audience you can bring one question home, for example, David Harvey's What does it mean to be human right now? at least language can go beyond an aesthetic form. This is why a speech act, which is language implicit in the action, is such a powerful form, because it enacts intention as well.

KH
Towards the end of a performance, I think people started to get anxious about the bodily conditions of the performers. It tallied as a physical metaphor for what was being spoken about, without it having to be one type of risk or another. This communicated a lot to do with what's at risk. What does it mean to be human? is like a positivist way of reading it, but as a cynical person, the reason such a question would be asked, is due to the general sense of being at risk. Pre-pandemic, the migrant caravans were so present, the enforcing of the border between Mexico and the States, the reinforcing of the national body versus the freedom of the individual human body. That sense of communicating anxiety and risk while listening was highly present too. From what I understand about speech acts per se, is that they're almost defensive. I mean, they can be requests or they can be performances or assertations of something, but rarely from an individual urgency if they are publicly heard. Nevertheless, having to perform yourself speaking implies there's already a need to insist that you exist.

AT
Absolutely, and I think that has to do with the fact of public appearance. Hannah Arendt talks about appearance, and how when you are in public you come into action, and that is when you make sense in the world. And I think that goes hand in hand with what you said about risk. The whole reason why the scenario was based on the idea of a playground is a combination of forces. When you are on a playground as a child, this is your first public sphere, where you negotiate space. But when you negotiate space, you are also at risk. The playground, as you know, was based on Abandonado II, a work commissioned by INSITE in 1992 to artists Ulf
Roloff and Michael Schnorr, who created a setting for children to play while they were waiting for their parents to cross the border. So, this becomes a contested space, where being at risk goes along with the idea of understanding what public space is.

KH
Well, there are two meanings of play, of course: one is the theatrical kind; and the other is free-play in the playground that is associated with children. The theatrical is normally associated with adulthood, I suppose. But there are certain correspondences. Children's play can be seen as rehearsal and adopting roles for later life. In adulthood, as Richard Sennett has spoken of, public life is the playing roles, and that facilitates, positively, political life. This leads back to the question What does it mean to be human today? with the multiplicity of public spaces. What interested me particularly about the presentation was that you could say it was a model of a playground and a model of a social body, as well as a model of a discourse, built from fragments of real discourse and real bodies and real play apparatus. It is quite rare to have that kind of environment played out without being put forward as a subjectivity.

AT
I like to think about the difference between public space and the public sphere, because the public sphere surrounds us without being a physical space—it is also social and linguistic. When you hear Andrea Fraser saying in her Inaugural Speech (INSITE97) that we are losing public space, or think about how everyone is claiming space, regaining space, you also think, what does it mean? What does it mean to regain public space, or the public sphere? What is so important in this public sphere that we need it back, that we need to regain it?

KH
There is the kind of idea of a social “I,” not a mob, but definitely a public, like quite an old-fashioned idea of the crowd, which people just hadn't had the chance to experience for such a long time, for a year and a half. Going back to my earlier reference to Richard Sennett, it's always important to recognize that everything is a theatre to an extent, whether it's comedy or tragedy. We are in those roles all the time. The classical idea of what does it mean to be human is being a free individual. But that sense of freedom as an ideal is today defined by the United States, which is particularly relevant in terms of the border. Freedom as an ideal is a lot less
embedded constitutionally in Mexico. In the US , there is this idea of freedom that everybody has the right to possess, somehow, which is totally artificial. Recognizing theatricality is also recognizing the limitations of freedom, as being an individual doesn't necessarily mean being powerless. In some ways, freedom is more powerless than anything else.

AT
That's an interesting term, the social “I.” Because it's not the same if you're looking and listening within an audience and being attentive to something within a group. At the same time, I think it's important that you mention freedom, because in terms of the public sphere, there are many things at play, which involve public speech and your body. And the small world you can possess is language and your body—these are your tools for appearing and doing things in the world. So, the sense of freedom always goes back to this individual authority that you have over your own body. When you go into public space with its restrictions, that's when political
action comes to reclaim freedom of space, property, or what is more, the ability to move freely around cities and institutions. And for me, archives are the same, going back to history and moving around memory offer a freedom that you possess to tell your own version of the story, and to have the freedom to reinsert it in the social public sphere.

KH
When dealing with the archive, or art in general, one has to reaffirm that your voice is equally valid as a genuine witness. I believe that it can be done in ways that come from an understanding that your perspective is filtered through a whole series of cultural, linguistic, and personal experience frameworks. One of the special challenges of working with an archive is to be able to represent both that distance and proximity. I was always quite impressed how a multiplicity of references sparked a synthesis of so many different aspects of Speech Acts. I like to think of Pat Kane who was part of the 1980s pop band Hue and Cry, and who now is a play theorist. He advocates for play as a form of thinking that has particular social aims. He wrote a book called The Play Ethic, which talks about free play, forms of creativity, forms of decentering, forms of care, and how play fosters care. He also had another project, which was a “constitute”—to take the idea of institution for a constitution. What would be the physical embodiment of a constitution, so a constitute? And it was a very over theorized proposal of how one can bring together a constitute as a social body, which is full of tensions and disharmony, in order to operate with the same aims as an institution but behaves much more like a socially minded structure. It isn't the same as counter-institutional, but it's alter-institutional. And that comes quite close to this idea of a fictional narrative, being able to supplement the historical. Something is lost without that dynamic play between two possible worlds. The public sphere is possibly a more dynamic interplay that is distinct from the public space, which is defined, institutionalized.