In close collaboration with local artists, architects and others PP is curating the Detroit Unreal Estate Agency.
Current activities include doing field research on ownership, setting up a residency, and developing a publication.
In the sticky summer heat of Detroit, Joost Janmaat, Reem Souma, Jasper van der Berg and Eric Rutten embarked on a new neighborhood project. In an attempt to get to grips with the street economy, we compiled something of a local yellow pages: an inventory of skills and businesses in the street.
They ranged from roofing and plumbing to dog training, professional pool playing, or the ability to take a toy apart and put it all back together again. Already during the interviews and talking to the neighbors, we hooked some people up: hope that our little back alley services guide will be a source of inspiration, new projects or just neighborhood help.
This Saterday, the Back Alley Services will be presented at a block pool party. We cleaned out the front yard of an abandoned house on Moran, got a pool from the suburbs, found a mobile barbecue on a local yard sale, painted the house in razzle dazzle, the crazy camouflage security painting scheme used by the American navy in the second world war.
A big American fridge will top it all off. And: we will be throwing a good old Dutch swap club, where everybody can swap there dearest belongings for things they like even better.
Pictures of the party will follow. Last thing to mention: Eric Rutten will be the first resident of the Power House residency project, a co-curated by Design 99 and Partizan Publik in collaboration with Fonds BKVB.
Edited by Christian Ernsten, Edwin Gardner and Andrew Herscher and designed by Nina Bianchi, the Detroit Unreal Estate Agency presented in Volume #22 the ATLAS OF LOVE AND HATE.
The Atlas, which was conceptually based on an idea of the geographer William Bunge, includes amongs others work by The Netherlands - based artists Lado Darakhvelidze, Jimini Hignett and Raymond Huizinga.
Andrew Herscher wrote the introduction, other University of Michigan affiliated contributors were Mireille Roddier, Marc Maxey and Craig Wilkins.
Herscher invited Detroit - based artists Nick Tobier as well as Shelby Moffett and Robert Smiley Jr. to contribute.
Partizan Publik's Ernsten, Gardner and Joost Janmaat developed three Utopia/Dystopia scenarios based on real existing urban renewal scenarios in Detroit.
Dutch Femke Lutgerink and Corine Vermeulen contributed with beautiful material from their 'Walk-in Portrait Studio'.
Bianchi's design was published as part of Volume #22 entitled 'The Guide'.
As a supplement to Volume #20 the Warren Special Report: From Crisis to Project imagines the redefined American Dream. Analyzing an utilizing the current crisis, the report seeks to imagine future suburbia taking Detroit's largest suburb Warren as a rolemodel. Bold visions, tools for transitionmanagement and new forms of organization and collaboration are the result of an ongoing research practice leading the way from Crisis to Project.
American and international media coverage of the cultural activities by actors as Design 99, the Detroit Unreal Estate Agency and others in Detroit tends to highlight how artists makes use of the current real estate crisis, how they are attracted by easy living in $100 houses and the post-industrial spectacle of the city. Without trying to negate these qualities of Detroit, I would like to argue that there might be something more to it.
Speaking as a member of the Detroit Unreal Estate Agency, I'm curious about the lessons that can be learned from Detroit. Learning from Detroit starts I think with a re-evaluation of the urban development discourse that engineered the city, and a different understanding of what engagement with this place and its people means.
Below I drafted some of the credentials of the Unreal Estate project: The Unreal Estate project intends to tap into the inventories of local assets and expertise in the city. In an interdisciplinary team we imagine stimulus strategies for local make-ability. As such, we don’t necessarily work against the effects of deindustrialization, suburbanization and outsourcing. Renovating the postindustrial city - along the lines of Richard Florida’s creative class – or, in turn, seeing the urban ruins as artistic opportunities is not our central motivation.
We respect that Detroit’s urban environment is still the home of many individuals and families, who ‘built’ their lives here. Align to this, it is our ambition to design or support stimulus strategies for urban transformation that lead to a resilient user-based city, which is enabling a vision on local opportunities. And, simultaneously, we intend to re-interpret and built on the value of decay, as well as, the intrusion of wildlife in the city. Decline is also creation and growth of something else if we can reframe our expectations, and offers different potential for co-existence, and strategies for urban development.
We intend to understand in artistic ways how urban engagement, as well as, urban play work under this condition. The collapse of the free market ideology creates a sense of emergency and the opportunity for a new kind of artistic agency, in which, to paraphrase Charles Esche, regional art and site-specific production are combined’, a kind of everyday life art.
Thus Unreal Estate project poses these questions: How to intervene on the city seeking the participation of the less advantaged people? Is it possible to start urban transformation as artists avoiding the traditional patterns of gentrification and economic exploitation of symbolic values? How to imagine a new equilibrium between the city, the human communities and the natural elements (plants, water, wilderness)? How to exchange culturally between this particular (urban) situation and other places in the world?
We realize that Detroit is an important example of contemporary urban living and, potentially, a case for a hands-on study on future urban scenario’s, which are also applicable for other places in the United States and in the rest of the world.
Yesterday I made a 20mi / 32km bike trip in Detroit. From Hamtramck to Downtown and back. Traveling this distance by bike gives you a good sense of the vast scale of this city, although this distance is but a small fragment of the size of the entire Metropolitan area of Detroit.
Where some of my initial thoughts on the derelict homes, factories, warehouses and skyscrapers were tainted by romanticism, now they're drained in the realization that this is an urban reality that is everywhere. An omnipresent sprawling landscape of destruction, generated by the rationality of hyper-capitalism. Fed by the misplaced escapism of the American dream, of starting over-and-over-and-over-and-over again in the suburbs, sub-suburbs, exurbs to the point that the notion of urbanity evaporates completely.
How to reinvent living together, 'a community' and perhaps even civilization on top of the ruins of the raison d'être of the previous one...
As a first action of the Unreal Estate Agency Andrew Herscher and Femke Lutgerink placed signs at various sites of unreal estate throughout Detroit. They were taken around by Dirk Bakker from the Detroit Institute of the Arts and Glenn Manisto.
The agency will produce, collect and inventory information on the ‘unreal estate’ of Detroit: that is, on the remarkable, distinct, characteristic or subjectively significant sites of urban culture. The project is aimed at new types of urban practices (architecturally, artistically, institutionally, everyday life, etc) that came into existence, creating a new value system in Detroit.
Partizan Publik is devoted to a braver society. The Partizans explore, produce and implement social, political and cultural instruments, which generate positive and sustainable change to people and their surroundings.
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