7 October 2015
Two days, that’s all it took for the Turinese journalist Francesca Berardi to recognize the “practical and emotional need” to write a book that would be able to convey the potentialities of Detroit: a wounded and forlorn metropolis, but one still filled with spaces, “both physical and for the imagination,” capable of opening up completely new prospects. Born out of a campaign of crowdfunding, Detour in Detroit presents the city in the form of an advanced kind of guidebook, through the voices of its inhabitants and the photographs of Antonio Rovaldi, an artist who like Berardi spends his time shuttling between the opposite shores of the Atlantic. Poetic in its every nuance, the book follows in the first instance a route of exploration that leads to a discovery of the urban fabric and a sense of its extraordinary mesh of energies and contradictions. And so we enter Motown, accompanied by interviews, stories and images, and encounter a landscape of resistance that, after the collapse of the Fordist utopia, is experimenting with new languages and slow but courageous strategies of growth, in essence starting over from scratch. Remote from the typically American rhetoric of rebirth, the voices she has selected to talk about the city belong to figures who often have a low profile, but who have written or are writing the cultural history of the place: the photographer Leni Sinclair, ex-wife of the poet John Sinclair, who documented like no one else the vibrant musical scene of the sixties and seventies; Derrick May, who together with Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson, is considered the father of techno music, born right here in Detroit in the eighties; Greg Baise, curator of the MOCAD, which is housed in a disused automobile showroom. Sinclair, May and Baise are just three of the over forty people interviewed by the author: their words reveal to us a city that is reflecting on its ruin, betting on sustainable development and seeking new forms of regional management. Thus in addition to decay and segregation, Francesca Berardi’s humble and sincere gaze uncovers experimental seeds and economies of subsistence for a future that has still to be invented. Published by Humboldt Books.
Photo: © Antonio Rovaldi
Photo: © Antonio Rovaldi
Photo: © Antonio Rovaldi
Photo: © Antonio Rovaldi
Photo: © Antonio Rovaldi