BOOK: INSITE Journal 05-Speech Acts

Founded in 1992, INSITE is a cultural initiative focused on commissioning artworks in the public sphere through collaborations among artists, cultural agents, institutions, and communities locally and abroad. The project is based in the Mexico/US border region of Baja California and Southern California. INSITE announced the fifth issue of the INSITE Journal: Speech Acts. The publication, edited by Andrea Torreblanca, explores speech, language, and the performative as forms of political action. It includes the script and documentation of Speech Acts, a short play that was developed from fragments of writings and recorded dialog culled from the INSITE Archive, and presented in Mexico City (2021); a conversation between Museo Jumex Chief Curator Kit Hammonds and Andrea Torreblanca; a recent interview with the artist Andrea Fraser; a text republished and translated for the first time into Spanish by author, curator, and filmmaker Ariella Aïsha Azoulay; and commissioned essays by theoretician and architect Keller Easterling and writer Cristina Rivera Garza. In “Art and Enactment” (2022), Andrea Fraser explains her interest in using the term enactment as a process that occurs and evolves from the psychoanalytic notions of the unconscious and the compulsory. In the essay “Another Part of Speech” (2022), Keller Easterling outlines forms of sovereignty as solidarities that are not reduced to specific places but are rather atomized and mobile. In “Unlearning Our Colonial Languages, On Language and Belonging” (2021), Ariella Aïsha Azoulay traces in retrospect the complexity of her genealogy and identity that she describes as “impacted by two colonial projects: a descendant of the colonized in Algeria, and a daughter of colonizers in Palestine.” Cristina Rivera Garza writes the text “What Are We Talking about When We Talk about Femicide?” (2022), which departs from the infamous case of the murder of her sister in the 1990s, to speak about how narratives, which only recently were defined as femicides, have focused on the perspective of the perpetrators, including the grammar used to prosecute them, and on literature, where the stories fictionalize—if not justify—the motives behind a crime. Journal_05 was inspired by Speech Acts, a play conceived, written, and directed by Andrea Torreblanca, that was performed several times daily during July and August 2021 at Museo Jumex. Speech Acts was born out of an invitation Kit Hammonds extended for INSITE to propose an intervention in his exhibition, Normal Exceptions: Contemporary Art in Mexico. The script was interpreted by the project Amplio Espectro with choreography by Arturo Lugo; the stage was conceived by the architecture studio PRODUCTORA. Journal_05 was designed by Cítrico Gráfico + Red. Please contact INSITE at info@insiteart.org to request a print copy of INSITE Journal_05.