Mapping the Interstitial: InSite 05
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Mapping the Interstitial: InSite 05

InSite 05 Park

HOWARD LIPIN / Union-Tribune

In contrast to the rigid U.S. border fence (far left), inSITE’s new public park, west of the bullring at Playas de Tijuana, uses circles and curves to bring people together at the beach.

“What must be mapped as a new international space of discontinuous historical realities is, in fact, the problem of signifying the interstitial passages and processes of cultural difference that are inscribed in the ‘in-between,'”

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture

The above quote came to mind as I heard more about InSite 05 – the trans-everything art event taking place now until November in and between San Diego and Tijuana. The idea of artisitic practices inhabiting or perhaps squatting in spaces between identities, communities, locations and cultures seems not only central (if this can even be said as centrality is a key concept interrogated by the whole event) to the conception of InSite and realized through the work presented and created for the festival. In December 2004, InSite’s curatorial visionary, Osvaldo Sanchez, was a guest speaker at the University of Minnesota’s Art and Commitment conference. Presenting with NYU prof and cultural critic George Yudice, their session titled “ Discerning the Heuristic Dimension of Public Art” was a fascinating introduction to artistic practices that, “catalyze a public experience, of what it is to come together as a public.”

Linkage:

New park turns attention from a forbidding border fence to a welcoming ocean

Transborder exhibition aims to redefine relationship between art and public

How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age

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