Helmut Weihsmann

Mittwoch 5.03.2014, 18.00 Uhr raum&designstrategien, Reindlstraße 16-18, 4040 Linz

A City Requiem – An Elegy on the Ruins of Detroit

Vortrag und Filmscreening mit Helmut Weihsmann

Helmut Weihsmann is a free lance scholar, guest PhD critic at the School of Architecture of Cambridge University (GB) and curator for film and architecture at the Filmcasino in Vienna and mediatheque of AUT in Innsbruck.

A City Requiem – An Elegy on the Ruins of Detroit
Just after the economic crisis of 2008 and financial meltdown of Detroit and other post-industrial cities in the so-called „rust belt“ stretching from Chicago through to the Great Lake areas, eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey to Baltimore, the once so thriving soul and automobile capital of the United States Detroit in particular was overtaken by ruinologists, urbanists, artists and photographers alike investigating and lamenting the „misfortune“ of urban decay in the disassembled suburbia. The media focuses its attention especially on the decline and shrinking process of Detroit as the American „Motor City“ (once labelled Motown, Ford-Town, GM-City, MC, Big D by the media) with its current catastrophic economic situation due to long-term changes in the automobile industry and the effects the social-economic decline has had on the residents and infrastructure of Detroit.

As large districts of Detroit fall silently and permanently to ruins, the city however has attracted a great number of young entrepreneurs, artists, dropouts and many fine art photographers and cinematographers in recent years to initiate a reverse process on planning procedures. Among them are filmmakers Jim Jarmusch, Michael Chanan, Heide Ewing and Rachel Grady and other documentary photographers like Andrew Moore, Ryuji Miyamoto and Yves Marchand in tandem with Romain Meffre to name just a few „ruinlogists“ of the last decade. In their handsome coffee table books, art portfolios and well-meant documentary films, favourite sites are featured and depicted, like the defunct Cadillac facility, the abandoned Michigan Central Railway Station, the magnificent Michigan State Theatre (now a parking garage) or deteriorating public schools and many dilapidated suburban homes, which turn once lively neighbourhoods either into wastelands or wilderness.

To it’s shocked inhabitants, Detroit became in recent years more or less involuntarily, the very centre of ruin pleasure and ruin voyeurism, while reporters from big magazines and TV-media flocked in like wild creatures, equipped with their expensive vans and rode around citing battered and trash-choked neighbourhoods or demolished or padlocked factories, exploiting Detroit’s fate and giving nothing back to the dim city. An increasing number of photographers, writers, urbanites and even contemporary urban archaeologists have begun to focus their attention on the aesthetics and materiality of ruins of Modernity in a discourse commonly dubbed as „ruin porn“, the latest fad of the decade.

The larger the ruin, the more pathetic and dramatic becomes its sad ending, perhaps because it had lost all of its previous glory and dignity due to various causes and reasons. Nor had the patina or rust of age on those newly made ruins in Detroit alarmed anyone in to stopping their vanishing beauty.