inSite/Casa Gallina
Casa Gallina
Sabino 190
Santa María La Ribera
Mexico City
www.insite.org.mx
We are pleased to announce the sixth edition of inSite: inSite/Casa Gallina, and thelaunch ofits website.
With inSite‘s 22-year history supporting artistic practices in the public domain and producing situations through participatory processes in the San Diego/Tijuana border region as a context, inSite/Casa Gallina will seek to establish a new network of public engagement in a historical Mexico City neighborhood.
Under Osvaldo Sánchez’s conceptual and programmatic direction, inSite/Casa Gallina will operate as a cultural production enclave in the dense topography of the neighborhood of Santa María La Ribera. The goal of the program is to inoculate/transgress/crash daily life through interventions and gestures with the potential to activate flows of group empathy. Its location—a house at the center of Santa María—was selected and renovated to operate as a hub from which creative situations in the public domain might be devised.
inSite/Casa Gallina is not conceived as an exhibition space nor as a social meeting point within the Mexican contemporary art scene, but rather as a platform for cultural production. For this edition, inSite has adopted an expanded timeframe for working that extends well beyond the biennial/exhibition format, allowing projects to develop according to their own specific contexts, necessities, and schedules over the course of approximately five years. As a physical site, Casa Gallina is at once intended to serve as a space of exchange and, potentially, as an incubator of situations within an unstable community (both in terms of physical territory as well as the terrain of knowledge), which seeks to have a hand in its own future based on the creative force resulting from an engaged process of reframing.
With the structure of inSite/Casa Gallina, inSite is further distancing itself from the aesthetizising models of “to be” contemporary or “being” contemporary. Every commissioned project will generate co-participatory processes in partnerships of extended fields of knowledge, in order to rethink the social prestige of creativity, as well as to subvert the inter-subjective fabric of daily life. The challenge is to motivate the public environment by producing emotionally intense and out of the ordinary experiences, as well as to promote revealing introspective—and perhaps even poetic—processes for individual or group involvement in the arena of the political.
inSite/Casa Gallina will determine its social models of operation and strategies based on the heritage of experimental artistic practices, “contemporary” or otherwise. But, above all, it will work based on the utopian and transformative legacy of everyday experiences in the context of new models—yet to be explored—of close-knit community relationships and well-being.
The house for inSite/Casa Gallina serves not only as the venue for residencies for artists and guest agents, but also will increasingly provide a center for neighborhood groups in a continuous process of reconfiguration—groups that are accepted and confronted as a specific critical social condition: an entity exposed to conflict, entropy, and resistance. In turn, these groups are encouraged to contribute to the continuous output of new imaginings and desires to connect, of gathering and interacting on a daily basis. An urban farm and open kitchen are key spaces for programs within the house—platforms that bring participants from within and outside Santa María together through solidarity, sustainability, food, and new models of production and consumption. It is in this context of daily life experience that inSite/Casa Gallina views the artist as a potential agent of change: in the political reimagining of the public domain and as a civilizing regenerator within urban entropies.
inSite/Casa Gallina has launched a website (www.insite.org.mx) to share with friends and colleagues the joint collaborations and research performed by artists and agents in Santa María La Ribera.
inSite is a continental project with a long tradition of working in a residency/ research-based context with contemporary artists. Since 1992, inSite has produced more than 200 commissioned works, from site-specific installations to urban interventions to co-participatory, situational, and process-related art in the public domain.
inSite/Casa Gallina founders and staff:
Strategic Founders: The Haudenschild Garage Foundation, The Lee Foundation, The Panta Rhea Foundation; and Aimée and Roberto Servitje / Executive Director, inSite: Michael Krichman / Executive Director, inSite/Casa Gallina: Carmen Cuenca / Project Director: Osvaldo Sánchez / Director of Finance and Administration: Danielle Reo / Administration: Susana Pineda / Production Manager: Sergio Olivares / Cultural Synergies: Josefa Ortega, Violeta Celis / Community Network: Naomi Rincón Gallardo / Knowledge Hub: Enrique Arriaga, Rodrigo Simancas / House Manager: Eric Álvarez / Maintenance: Sandra Rodríguez