INSITE Journal 03: VITAL FORMS
INSITE is pleased to announce the third edition of the INSITE Journal, an online publication focused on the intersection of art and the public sphere. VITAL FORMS is a title inspired by Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino, who described how vital actions such as desire, energy, and sensibility shaped her sculptures in the process of molding clay with her hands during her project for INSITE97.
In this third edition, for ESSAYS, professor and curator Julia Bryan-Wilson provides powerful statements that connect different realities of the current moment, while addressing the relevance of vital forms, labor, and materiality. In the same section, curator, writer, and art historian Lars Bang Larsen considers “irritation” as an organic dimension that affects bodies and systems to permeate and intensify social life.
For IN FOCUS, writer and critic Jeffrey Kastner delves into the project Signs of Mount Signal (inSITE2000) by artist Allan McCollum. In his text, Kastner poignantly analyzes the historical layers of this geological form, to then consider it as a phenomenon of “absent entity” with multiple meanings. For Anna Maria Maiolino’s project There Could Be Many More Than These (INSITE97), curator Sharon Lerner thoughtfully characterizes her organic work as being part of a vital cycle that imposes a “ritual distance.”
A new section of the Journal, SELECTIONS FROM THE ARCHIVE, presents previously unpublished material (an interview, video, and audio transcription) of artist Silvia Gruner from the realization of her project The Middle of the Road (inSITE94), where she narrates in-depth the process and purpose of her work.
DOCUMENTS highlights the project Porcelain (2017–18, inSite/Casa Gallina) by artist Marianna Dellekamp, in which she convened a group of women from the Santa María La Ribera neighborhood of Mexico City to weave and share personal stories. At the same time, each of the participants contributed personal objects that were first reproduced in porcelain by the artist, and then broken and repaired by each member, using as a reference the ancestral Japanese technique of Kintsugi. Finally, artist Andy Goldsworthy is featured with his project Two Stones (inSITE94), in which he covered large stones and fallen trees with clay in two different sites (inside the San Diego Museum of Art and outside in Gold Gulch Canyon, Balboa Park) to let them organically metamorphose as time passed.
INSITE Journal_03 is edited by INSITE's Director of Curatorial Projects Andrea Torreblanca.
Read the third edition here.
INSITE continues to be focused on making public through the INSITE Archive twenty-eight years of production; commissioning new work by scholars, curators, and artists in quarterly editions of the INSITE Journal and related online initiatives; and planning, now underway, for future projects.
