"Thirteen years after inSite_05 inaugurated in what would be the last edition of inSite located on the border between Tijuana and San Diego, this book tells the history of the sixth edition and five year project that tells the story of inSite / Casa Gallina in the neighborhood of Santa María la Ribera in Mexico City. The collective process of composition of this publication involved the neighbors and users, the permanent team (among which some are neighbors), the guests hired by the inSite / Casa Gallina team to perform specific actions (workshops, classrooms, artistic projects ...), to new guests (Writers who are not neighbors or collaborators and who were given the task of writing about the project). Therefore, this book is, among other things, a collection of names, of individuals who entered at some point in contact with inSite / Casa Gallina and its activities "...the proposal that although there would be artists invited to participate in residences of long-term research -mostly Mexicans-, neither they nor their works would be the main focus, but would constitute only one of the elements of a constellation of cultural, educational, scientific and communal-social organized by inSite / Casa Gallina with residents of Santa María la Ribera. Therefore, instead of exploiting the community to that it was at the service of some kind of reconceptualized notion of social art, the initiative would focus on the community in order to provide new opportunities so that you could think again as such, as community. Of all the inSite projects, Casa Gallina is the one that is least focused on art, but it is also the one that has done more to question the Curatorial conventions. Maybe, that's why it's the inSite initiative that has had a more relevant effect"--Pablo Lafuente "Casa Gallina is the most recent edition of in/Site, an art program held five times between 1992 and 2005 within an 80-kilometer corridor along the San Diego-Tijuana border between the USA and Mexico. At Casa Gallina, which was launched in 2013 and whose edition ends in 2018, the initiatives are developed in one particular neighborhood, Santa Maria la Ribera, a hub of hybrid public life in the megalopolis of Mexico City. Casa Gallina fulfills a dual role, as a place to house processes of participation in the neighborhood, and as a residence for artists who work with the local people. All of this is undertaken outside of the scope of conventional art world The meeting places include a kitchen garage open to local residents, a space for ideas to be exchanged and developed by artists and their collaborators, another space for technical workshops, and a further open space devoted for accumulating and exchanging knowledge produced by carrying out projects and programs. "It's not a community house, reinforcing the identity of the community -which would mean conforming to a police principle on Rancièrean terms- precisely because the intention is to keep the potential not only of the results (projects), but also of the subjective experience of those participating in the collaborative activity"--Front flap
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