About

The opening of Wandering Position >Selections from the inSite Archive at Mexico City’s University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC) in late 2010 marked not only the first exhibition devoted exclusively to the archive, but also the inauguration of Arkheia, a new space at MUAC dedicated to the exhibition of its extensive collection of art-related archives and documentation. The exhibition also celebrated INSITE’s donation of the INSITE archive to Arkheia.

Wandering Position was conceived and curated by Donna Conwell, then a researcher at the Getty Research Institute, who had previously served as a co-curator of the Interventions component of inSite_05. Beginning in 2007, Donna led the two-year effort to develop the archive with a team working out of INSITE’s San Diego office.

In addition to a complete display of the archive itself (binders and CDs with documentation from each project and program completed for the first five versions of INSITE), Wandering Position highlighted projects based on five broad themes: Circulating Objects (Kim Adams, Sylvia Gruner, and Judi Werthein); Public Address (Terry Allen, Itzel Martínez del Cañizo, and Krzysztof Wodiczko); Co-Production of Event-Experiences (Gustavo Artigas, Javier Téllez, and the group of Nina Katchadourian, Steven Matheson, and Mark Tribe); Performance Interventions (Carlos Amorales and Andrea Fraser); and Recording Trajectories (Francis Älys and Yukinori Yanagi). Exhibition design for Wandering Position was a commission to the Peruvian-born architect Giacomo Castagnola, and included a unique system of display—from vitrines to video cabinets to a system of shelves holding the material of the archive. Castagnola’s system and furniture have been used by Arkheia for multiple exhibitions of its collection since 2010.

Wandering Position includes the diverse documentation held in this archive, which not only records the different works but also serves as the means to re-activate those works in different contexts and for different audiences. Thus Wandering Position encourages the discussion and analysis of the links created between each work of art and the archive. The purpose of the document display is to erase the traditional line between archives and works of art, while urging the viewer to use the documentary material as a device to demonstrate the work processes of public participation projects. It also encourages different readings of the documents, audiovisuals, and photographs as vehicles to preserve the meaning of works of art beyond their specific place and time.

— Donna Conwell