Detroit (USA) ///
Robert Andersen, filmmaker, Detroit, Derrick Gilbert, writer, Ann Arbor/Michigan, and Aurora Harris, writer, Detroit
Slam Poets from D, in D
Video, 18 min, 2004
A popular component of cultural life in Detroit is the Poetry Slams, which often address everyday social life in the city. A short film with six Poetry Slam artists at selected sites in the urban space.
Mitch Cope, artist, Detroit
Fortifications Detroit
6 drawings, 2004
This series of drawings documents six types of security and fortified facilities in Detroit and its suburbs.
DCDC/Dan Pitera and Christopher Lee, architects, Detroit, and Standard Films | Jody Huellmantel, video artist, Detroit, with Mitch Cope, artist, Detroit
Moving Graves
Video installation, 2003-04
In Detroit, not only the living but also the dead are leaving the inner city: Every year, hundreds of the dead are reburied in suburban cemeteries.
Andrew Dosunmu, artist, New York
Hot Irons
16-mm film, transferred to DVD, 44:55 min, 1999
Hot Irons provides a fascinating glimpse into the world of Afro-American hair fashion. Five Detroit hair artists who are preparing for the meanwhile internationally renowned annual competition "Hair Wars" explain the uniqueness and significance of this hair art.
John Ganis, photographer, Detroit
The Changing Landscape of the Detroit Metropolitan Area
4 photographs, color, 1987-2004
Ganis documents the consumption of landscape and the advance and penetration into nature of new construction.
Tyree Guyton, artist, Detroit, with Tammy Lynn Evans, graphic artist, Detroit
The Heidelberg Project
Project documentation with various objects in a showcase, video, chronological table, 2004
Urban art projects on unused inner city land have triggered energetic responses, from support to vehement rejection. The project is a social catalyst that also draws tourists into a moribund city district.
Benjamin Miguel Hernandez and Chris Turner, artists, Detroit
Slim's Bike
Video and C-print, 2004
The eccentric James Thompson, "Slim", and his imaginatively designed mobile bicycle sculpture are an urban legend of Detroit's Cass Corridor, a dilapidated district near the university where many students, artists, and intellectuals live.
Scott Hocking, artist, Detroit
Pictures of a City: Scrappers
Installation and 40 photographs, color, on wood, 2001-2004
The cannibalization of empty buildings for scrap metal and other usable raw materials is a survival strategy for many residents of Detroit's inner city. This installation with several parts documents the environs and lifestyle of the scrappers.
iCUE/Kyong Park, artist, Detroit
Detroit: Making It Better for You
2-channel video installation, 9:25 min, 2000
In this short video film in the style of an advertisement, Kyong Park develops a polemical conspiracy theory about how Detroit's inner city came to be abandoned and deteriorated - and who benefited from this.
iCUE/Kyong Park, artist, Detroit
Old House and New House/New City and Old City
2-channel video installation, 2003-04
The double projection contrasts images of the old life of the inner city and of the new life in the suburbs. Interviews with residents of the inner city and the suburbs reveal personal memories, life courses, everyday experiences, and differing realities.
Jeff Karolski, artist, Detroit
Devil's Night Poster Series
5 posters, 2004
Every year in the nights before Halloween, hundreds of empty buildings have been set afire. The wide variety of contradictory explanations and myths of the origin of this "custom" indicate the heterogeneous motives behind this spectacle.
Christopher McNamara, artist, Windsor
Magic City (wed. spec. 2004 remix)
Installation: video double projection and flipper machine, 2004
This autobiographical installation contrasts footage from Canadian television coverage of Detroit's racial unrest in 1967 and images of a slowly rotating lawn sprinkler in front of the artist's parents' one-family house.
Kelly Parker, filmmaker, Detroit, with Mark Dancey, illustrator, Detroit, and Toni Moceri, anthropologist, Detroit
Coda Motor City
Video, 16 min, 2003-04
In the car manufacturing city Detroit, there is only a vestige of a public transport system. The 22 percent of all households that own no car are practically immobile, physically and socially trapped.
Clinton Snider, artist, Detroit
Memorial
Painting, oil on wood, 2004
In a cityscape typical of Detroit - fragmented and only rudimentarily built up - people have mounted stuffed animals and other toys on a telephone pole in memory of a child's death.
Ingo Vetter, artist, Berlin
Detroit Industries - Urban Agriculture
4 maps with 9 photographs each, color, 2003-04
In Detroit there are attempts at self-organized community projects that use the vast empty surface of the inner city for agriculture and horticulture.
Peter Williams, artist, Detroit
Ratman, Thug
Painting, oil on paper, 2000
The painting takes as its themes: American racism, questions of identity, and stereotypes in the context of urban life and popular culture.
Andrew Zago, architect, New York and Detroit
Detroit Banks
Photo series, color, with supplementary textual information, 1998-2004
This documentation of the current state and use of former bank branch offices from the first half of the 20th century shows examples of the transformation of the city. Conspicuous along with some abandoned buildings are also new uses others have been put to.