The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit

Urban Toeholds

Center for Creative eXchange

The Center for Creative eXchange was envisioned by its founder, Phaedra Robinson, as a conduit for “creative energy” to flow into and out of Detroit. The physical location of the center was a burned-out house in the Woodbridge neighborhood, purchased by Robinson from the City of Detroit. The house was to serve as a venue for exhibitions and performances, community gardening and recycling, and residencies for artists and writers. These activities were to develop synergistically: gardens would provide food to nourish resident artists and writers; these artists and writers would create exhibitions and performances and/or assist in the rehabilitation of the center's building; visitors to the center would sponsor work by its resident artists and writers, and so on. During the reconstruction of the physical space in which it was housed, the center also sponsored events such as a “Gallery Bike Crawl,” in which visitors rode a route connecting art studios and galleries in and near downtown Detroit.

While the programs envisioned by the center were to function synergistically, these programs also comprised an assemblage of post-industrial urban therapies, each seeking to re-vision the possibilities inherent in Detroit's conditions of disinvestment and depopulation. This re-visioning framed Detroit not as a crisis or disaster, but as a context for new kinds of creative production and exchange. In 2009, the building that housed the center was put up for sale; this building then re-entered Detroit's landscape of empty houses and became available for other uses, licit or illicit, reactionary or progressive, therapeutic or dangerous.

Filter Detroit

Filter Detroit is a guest residence for artists and researchers sited in a house in North Hamtramck, across the street from the Power House and blocks away from the Full Scale Design Lab. The project was initiated by Kerstin Niemann, a Hamburg-based curator who, as a guest curator with the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, worked on the “Heartland” exhibition about innovative artistic production in the American Midwest. Filter Detroit is an attempt to further this production by providing a place for information and inspiration to be exchanged between “artists, visionaries and thinkers from the region as well as the outside.” It is also at attempt to direct creative thought specifically toward urban initiatives, with Detroit considered as both a place of challenge and opportunity.

As well as providing a physical site for exchange to take place, Filter Detroit intends to comprise a “living archive” where knowledge about alternative urban initiatives in Detroit is deposited and consolidated. As such, the project intends to institutionalize a process that otherwise occurs in a more-or-less unplanned and decentralized manner.

Ego Circus

Ego Circus is an invitation-only residency for artists and architects in Hamtramck. The residency is sited in a house purchased in 2008 by an anonymous group of recent graduates of the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Unlike perhaps every other residency program in Detroit, Ego Circus explicitly extricates itself from the businesses of “saving the neighborhood,” “building the community,” or providing another sort of social service through art and architecture. Rather, Ego Circus informs its residents that they are free to experiment in their medium without fulfilling any putative social function—a freedom that is permitted, according to Ego Circus, by the vast oversupply of houses in the depopulated city of Detroit.

The stated backgrounding of art and architecture as social practices of course renders the precise social status of art and architecture as fraught—far more fraught than when there is a tacit agreement on the social valence of these disciplines. The freedom to experiment in and on the house where Ego Circus is based has thus yielded a series of anxious meditations on the ambitions, achievements and evaluative criteria of artistic and architectural research.

These meditations have almost all taken the form of site-specific interventions in the Ego Circus house, interventions that become mere raw material for alteration when a subsequent cohort of residents arrive. The work that Ego Circus fosters, then, leaves no lasting trace, except in photographic documentation; autonomous artistic and architectural research is performed on the remains of autonomous artistic and architectural research. “No-one was harmed in the making of this work,” Ego Circus announces at its exhibitions—but this is a claim that could also be understood to poignantly contradict its intention to liberate art and architecture from social responsibility.