Like these kindred projects, inSITE departs from the attachment to site as that set of physical (rather than social or historical) attributes prioritized for placing a sculpture or carrying out an "intervention," as was characteristic of the quite different work of Robert Smithson, Carl André, Richard Serra, or appropriation artists like Jenny Holzer. Instead, the city or the region is supposed to provide the opportunity to explore the tendencies to publicization and privatization, especially as its residents and itinerants experience them. Rather than simply "parachute" into a site, artists are invited to spend time there, often up to more than a year, get to know its history and the community, and on this basis arrive at the concepts and materials that comprise a project. In the case of inSITE, a thematization of the region or some aspect of it is not mandated, but the issues associated with it are expected to serve as point of departure for the artistsí­ projects. It could be said that the artists are enjoined to produce surprise, although that is not always the outcome, especially in those projects that attempt to best the border. And since a good number of artists come from afar with international reputations, many works involve an imbrication of the local and the transnational or global, as well as outreach to institutions and venues not usually associated with art. Indeed, as inSITE evolved, its focus shifted from showcasing finished works to those process-oriented projects in the 2000 version that "enlist the active participation of the public in their development" and "interweav[e] artists and works into the fabric of communities . . . sustained over an eighteen?month period."

One of the projects that best exemplify the complex of competing agendas is Krzysztof Wodiczkoí­s video projection of womení­s testimonials of abuse by men, managers, and officials onto the huge globe at the Centro Cultural Tijuana. According to the project description, Wodiczko sought to "give visibility and voice, through the use of advanced media technologies, to women who work in Tijuanaí­s maquiladora industry." Discussing his work after the projection, Wodizcko explained that he sought to bring the privatized suffering of women into a public space controlled by class and gender hierarchies, especially in the Mexican context. This intrusion of the repressed into public space no doubt has consequences, and Wodiczko and his assistants from the inSITE staff—Cecilia Garza Bolio and Tobias Ostrander—worked with these women over a one-year period to help them develop psychologically in order to make their denunciations and face the potential repercussions.

Wodiczkoí­s project condensed a social justice agenda, a psychological aim, and a public stratagem into an almost surreal event in which huge distorted heads talked of private traumas in the most public monument in Tijuana. The effect was more powerful than Bretoní­s characterization of the intoxicating surrealist image: a dewdrop with the face of a cat. But in Wodiczkoí­s project, the unconscious took on a public dimension, unlike the privatized and individualized surrealist image. If Bretoní­s Nadja dealt with an individual madness, the madness of the women in Wodiczkoí­s project was a public manifestation. The effect was quite powerful.

Nevertheless, the experience would have been even more riveting had the public been able to know of all the preparations that constituted this work. The most successful inSITE projects transpire in the connections, contacts, interactions, modifications, and troubleshooting performed not only by the artist but also by inSITE directors, curators, staff and interns with a range of community, political, governmental, and cultural and business institutions. Wodiczko not only had the help of inSITE staff, but also the collaboration of women from non-governmental organizations such as Factor Equis and a group of women lawyers who helped identify the protagonists in this event. What Wodiczko defined as the "agon" taking place in the agora of Tijuana had a range of shadow actors, who also constituted the invisible unconsciousness of the work.

Of the 650 reviews and critical essays written about the inSITE94, inSITE97 and the preparations for inSITE2000 through August 2000, not one deals with the year-long preparations, negotiations with public, private and community organizations, the acquisition of permissions, etc. that make a work possible. In the reviews and critical pieces, collaboration and interaction seem to mean the encounter or working together of two actors: poor (often racialized) people, on the one hand, and artists, on the other, as if "engagement" were only important in the coming together of these two actors. For the reasons reviewed above, this is a somewhat fetishized understanding of "collaboration" and "public," particularly insofar as the labor of publics goes largely unrecognized. Moreover, there are many other actors, many intermediaries that collaborate in the authorship of these works. For a year or more, artists have been working with the curators, directors, the directorsí­ staff, corporate, public and community representatives (contact with which is almost always facilitated by directors and staff). Writers often hark back to the avant-garde notion of bringing art and life together, yet do not appreciate that life (including the everyday arrangements for the projects developed for inSITE) flows through a capillary profusion of macro- and micro-institutions and networks of individuals.