Please the goat

Today, we’ve helped KT out a bit at the Catherine Ferguson Academy Farm. It’s a beautiful day, lots of sunshine and refreshingly cold.

We milked a goat… It pleased her while she was eating.

And we fed the chickens, geese and bunnies too. KT says we’re real good farmers, ‘cause we chose, out of our own free will, to clean out the bunny cages. The bunnies were grateful.

Afterwards, we treated ourselves to a fantastic Rhode Island Clam Chowder and a sandwich at Russel’s Deli. KT traded two jars of fresh goat milk for super sandwiches and soup. That’s cool.

HEAD SPIN

It’s snowing big time at the moment in Detroit. Schools and Universities are closed, meetings are cancelled, and traffic goes slowly, permanently trying not to get stuck in a pile of snow.

Interestingly enough, this situation opened up a scenario for a mind-twisting conversation (coincidence or fate?). If not for the snow, my mind wouldn’t be triggered as it is right now, spinning around issues of resentment, community, decadence, collaboration, hierarchy, acknowledgment, reflection, arrogance, energy, and world dominance. There is something about the friction or duality and complexity of thoughts within a single individual that is so appetizing. I am certainly not talking about myself right now, but more about the mind torture that is created through a unique meeting over breakfast (garlic potatoes, scrambled eggs, latte and bread). There is a subliminal understanding which is hard to grasp and put into words though. So we’re faced now with the challenge of structuring everything we’ve learned so far during our stay here, and putting it into action both in Utrecht as well as in Detroit. It is energising and scrumptious to say the least.

For now, this is all pretty cryptic, but be sure to be posted on the practical outcome of it all.

WE'VE GOT A "TWO-FIVE" HERE...!

Yes, Bart and I are back in Detroit again. This time for only a week, to catch up with our friends, as well as to meet new people for future exchanges. We also brought the publication that we’ve made with Nikos and Joao about their stay in Detroit and the three stations that followed afterwards in The Netherlands and Germany. And we also brought the whole “Archive of Impressions” that we exhibited in our Expodium space last October.

When we arrived at the Detroit airport, this time it was me who was picked out of the queue at Customs for a thorough check (who are you? What are you doing here? Where are you staying?). The lady at the desk looked at my passport, took my fingerprints, and without any question called a colleague of hers. The only thing she said was: “we’ve got a Two-Five here”..... All of a sudden I was a “two-five”, and I didn’t even know what that was. I was brought down to two numbers, which probably stood for something suspicious and which needed extra attention.

I was brought up to a special desk where another lady took my passport and started typing all kind of stuff into her computer. I tried to explain why I was here, and at the point that I was talking about the exchange of knowledge and experiences between Detroit and Utrecht, she cut me off and asked if I wanted to open my suitcase.

She went through my stuff (boxer shorts, warm socks, towel, toothpaste, shirts) and saw a carton box – about an A4 size. “What’s in the box?” she asked, and I replied “an exhibition”. There we stood, a couple of seconds, realising what the situation was, and she let me go. It’s great to be back again.

DETROIT: THE PUBLICATION

Bart and Luc are heading to Detroit to visit the "dream-team".
They will be carrying in their luggage the ARCHIVE OF IMPRESSIONS exhibition package as well as our recently produced Detroit publication.

"DETROIT: BACK TO THE FUTUREARCHIVE OF IMPRESSIONS - between illusion and delusion, Urban and Rural, living and leaving" is a 179 pages booklet, printed in a limited edition of 30 copies. Every copy is numbered and signed.
Around 10 of them will be distributed to the organizations and initiatives we have been collaborating with and 20 copies will be circulated to a expanded network of professionals as part of the Urban Translations project  .

This publication is designed to give an inside to our journey so far. It includes part of the Visual Archive, a series of texts as well as documentation photos and descriptive articles of all three stations of the Translation Process.



Unlike most booklets "DETROIT: BACK TO THE FUTUREARCHIVE OF IMPRESSIONS" avoids a linear order. A plastic screw on the top left side binds all pages together, inviting readers to "twist" instead of "flip", suggesting various starting points.

"This publication is set to give a mere impression of Detroit’s complexity and highlight notions, embedded within its current state. Notions such as mutualism and the sense of taking care, preservation and the sense of belonging, agency, necessity and the trust in the outcome of a creative mind......As artists interested in social phenomena, we research, documentate and mediate. We “engage” with our subject matter, put trust in our practice, our background knowledge and reflective skills.
But so do architects, philosophers, sociologists and journalists.
We have often wondered what separates us from any other researcher.
This publication is set to give an answer to that and establish a more concrete perception of our status during our sixty-four days residency in Detroit.
Cultural colonizers? Accidental tourists? Parachuted maggots? Temporal residents or all of the above? "
Abstract from the publication's introductory text.


p. 178.

Translation Process #2: Impakt Performance

Nikos Doulos Joao Evangelista
17.10.10 17:00 bus departure at Theater Kikker
( limited capacity)

Expodium’s participation in the Impakt Festival was a commissioned, progress-based work on ‘shrinking cities and emerging strategies’, carried out in a collaboration with the artists Nikos Doulos (Greece) and João Evangelista (Portugal) during a period of 64 days in Detroit.

The event revolved around the traces and marks left on the artists during their residency by means of a modular narrative in stations. Spectators were encouraged to envision the urban landscape in a process of arrivals and departures, an archive of impressions and stories.

An old American school bus took the audience out of the center of Utrecht to Hofstede, a preserved monument - farm, built next to the upcoming center of Leidsche Rijn.



First stop took place at Expodium, where people got confronted with the Visual Archive and were given twenty minutes to dive into it.
The visit to the farm consisted of scripted narratives performed on predefined locations/stations.



The discontinuity in the form of our narratives, shifting from here (Leidsche Rijn) to there (Detroit) and vice versa, served the purpose of highlighting the bypolarity in the co-existence of the urban and the rural, growth and shrinkage, Detroit and the Netherlands. What became of great importance to us was pointing out the need for a collective creative response towards the transitional nature of contemporary urban surroundings.

The city doesn't need artists. it needs persons who can respond creatively to life.
Erin Moran Martinez



first page of the tour script after rehearsal in the rain.

contribution to Filter-Detroit

FILTER DETROIT is the little sister of FILTER; a platform for international contemporary art and culture.
FILTER DETROIT researches structural and cultural processes of transformation in the urban landscape of Detroit. FILTER DETROIT is a research residence for artists and cultural producers and makers from Detroit and outside of Detroit.
FILTER DETROIT collaborates with Detroit’s cultural institutions and initiatives as well as internationally.
FILTER DETROIT is building up a living archive, a constantly transforming archive of information, documentation, knowledge, activity and space about urban interventions as well as social and artistic movements in Detroit and particularly on Moran Street in Detroit.

We got introduced to Kerstin Niemann by Luc and Bart, during our first visit to the Filter house in Moran Street.
After her invitation to contribute to the "live archive" of FILTER DETROIT, we started investigating what we could leave behind that would function as a manual for upcoming visitors and additionally work as a voice for all of the people we had encountered.

We therefore invited everyone we met to respond to the question of "how did you perceive our visit to Detroit".

For the last couple of years the city has become the center of attention for many social engaged artists and initiatives worldwide.

Detroit is not a blank canvas and every single attempt to represent its reality should be practiced with considerable thought and caution.

We received a small amount of contributions and decided make a small publication (one for FILTER DETROIT and one for EXPODIUM) in two copies.

All the contributions were placed unedited together with the following introductory text.

Dear Reader,

Attached to this letter you will find a series of contributions from the people we had encountered during our stay in Detroit. These following pages are the voice of a few. A few who are living and leaving, who belong and don't belong, a few who we have met in the 64 days spent in the city of Detroit.

We were here as the first artists in a residency initiated by Expodium Platform Voor Jonge Kunst (NL), 555 Gallery (US) and THE YES FARM (US).

As a response to the invitation of Kerstin to contribute to the living archive of the Filter Project, we decided to mediate what those that live here have thought, felt, believed, misunderstood, denied, accepted, dealt with and resolved, with our ephemeral stay.

We are aware that Detroit is not a blank canvas - that its inhabitants are fully capable of raising a critical voice and acting on matters imposed to their everyday lives. We asked the basic question of how do you perceive our temporary living in your community.

This passing through that promised only to deliver a gaze from an accidental tourist - a concerned one, a caring one, one under the weight of an ethics of the encounter with the other. Detroit’s past and its eminent future, with a complex present, filled with life and death, reveals a present cycle that promises so many potentialities. One cannot but dwell in daydreaming, a very hopeful dream.

In between illusion and delusion, in between the portrayal of Detroit as the post-industrial dystopia and Alice's Wonderland where every artists dream is possible, we found ourselves living with these people, and now we find ourselves leaving these people.

These contributions give a small but significant input to the problems of ephemeral living and practices of numerous visitors (artists, researchers, theoreticians etc.) in the Detroit area.

We put trust on people’s choice to express themselves through actions rather than words, through closed verbal encounters rather than public written contributions.

Therefore our call found place only within the ones who chose to formulate their opinions in that specific manner. Most of them chose the former rather than the later, but we feel strongly about maintaining that “literate” silence.

All contributions are placed unfiltered and unedited and should be treated with great respect in regards to each author.

We claim no authorship to the material and we expect any appropriation or use to occur under the full agreement of all the contributors. Whether you are a visitor or an inhabitant of the city, we invite you to flip through it, read carefully or discard it. We hope you have a fruitful stay and pleasant living.

Wishing you all the best,

Nikos Doulos & João Evangelista

Translation Process #1: Archive of Impressions

Nikos Doulos Joao Evangelista
1.10.10 - 29.10.10

Detroit's situation can be read as a visual manifestation of the new post-industrial city, a hybrid of a paradoxical alignment of the urdan and the rural, taking place in a single geographical frame, wrapped in a mediatic representation caught between delusion and illusion between " ruin porn" photography and the idea of a safe haven for artist.
The city displays far more complex signals that constitute the begging of a whole new attempt towards gentrification process, suggesting the rebirth of Detroit into a city of the future.

Station #1: Visual Translation- Archive of Impression
The exhibition is a visual amalgam of the one-month "translation process" the artists have undergone since their arrival back in the Netherlands. The gallery becomes a sight where a narrative of images is composed assisted by a script of factual and subjective subtitles.





You are confronted with a series of images - a visual archive - an archive of impression.
Think of them as stills of a movie. A movie that is open ended and has multiple narratives for you to explore.
You are given its script and your choice of movements will animate it.