About

Speech Acts is a play based on a script crafted from fragments of artists projects, conversations, writings, and interviews commissioned over the past thirty years through INSITE. The script, by Andrea Torreblanca, is a montage of texts published in the first five issues of the INSITE Journal: Performing Resilience, Social Beings, Vital Forms, After History, and Speech Acts.

Speech Acts is a play in two senses of the word: first as a theatrical performance based on written and spoken words; and second, as a playground—primarily inspired by INSITE artists projects—in which actors/dancers performed daily to enact a form of public space on a stage designed by the architects PRODUCTORA. Each excerpt has been selected to reveal the intersection (and tension) of political, social, and cultural contexts to which artists, scholars, and cultural practitioners have responded through INSITE for three decades. Speech Acts begins with a question by theorist and geographer David Harvey: “What does it mean to be human right now?” The premise of the exhibition is the notion that over time words become simultaneously powerful and fragile—and that even when written or spoken for another time and context, they can be asserted as propositions to motivate action in the present and the future.

Speech Acts includes the voice and texts of Terry Allen, Lars Bang Larsen, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Johnny Coleman, Donna Conwell, Kerry Doyle, Andrea Fraser, Fernando García-Dory, Carles Guerra, Marina Gržinić, Silvia Gruner, David Harvey, Pablo Helguera, Grant Kester, Anna Maria Maiolino, Tobias Ostrander, Elizabeth Povinelli, Lucía Sanromán, Greg Sholette, Itala Schmelz, Allan Sekula, Chris Sharp and Simon Sheikh.

Speech Acts was part of the exhibition Normal Exceptions: Contemporary Art in Mexico, and was presented daily in Gallery 1 at Museo Jumex from July 15 -August 15, 2021.