Border encounters of a public kind.

• Author: Wyels, Joyce Gregory
• Position: GALLARY PLACE - InSite_05, art exhibition

Metallic, rigid, corroded, the fence that separates the northwestern corner of Mexico from the southwestern reaches of the United States cuts like a scar across the natural curves of the border region's hills and valleys. Then, as though attempting to divide the waters of the Pacific Ocean itself, this man-made barrier marches headlong into the sea.

Late last August, on the U.S. side, a small cluster of spectators gathered on a rise overlooking the fence, perhaps drawn by the noisy spectacle taking place on the Mexican side, or perhaps attracted by the news that a "human cannonball" was poised to sail more than one hundred feet over the fence, from Playas de Tijuana to California's Border Field State Park.

The daredevil stunt was planned as the culmination of a production by artist Javier Tellez, whose project in turn made up part of inSite_05/Art Practices in the Public Domain, the latest in a series of cross-border art initiatives that periodically shake up the neighboring cities of San Diego and Tijuana. The fifth--and most ambitious-of the programs, inSite_05 drew more than one hundred international artists, curators, and academics to the two border cities.

San Diego architect Teddy Cruz set the scene with a visual chronology of the fence itself, which in the space of a generation has morphed from imaginary line to formidable barricade. Photographs from the early 1970s show children blithely flying kites where the fence now stands, unaware of any boundaries. Several years later, a porous chain-link fence gave way to a ten-foot steel wall, fourteen miles long, constructed from corrugated landing mats left over from the Gulf War. (Ironically, notes Cruz, "the horizontal ridges give people a foothold for climbing.") Current proposals verge on the fortifications of the Berlin Wall.

Though augmented by other types of artistic expressions--museum exhibitions, performance events, and "conversations" (lectures and dialogues), the heart of inSite_05 is its "interventions," in which commissioned artists create encounters in the public domain. With the support of individuals, foundations, corporations, and government agencies on both sides of the border, twenty-two artists from fifteen countries took up residence in the region. These residencies, spanning two to three months each over a two-year period, promoted informal discussions among artists and curators. More importantly, they enabled the artists to immerse themselves in the charged atmosphere of the border area and build collaborative relationships with community members.

"San Diego and Tijuana are so close, yet so far," says Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa, explaining that though the two cities are physically close, they are "contextually very different." Disparate cultures, languages, and life-styles merge and clash in the border region, fostering...