info on Wed, 2 Jun 2010 21:39:18 +0200 (CEST)


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[Nettime-nl] evening of ideas & documentary screening Grown in Detroit


An evening of ideas, discussions, presentations and film, on the topic of, The breakdown of control and surveillance situations and rise of self-organisation in Detroit, The Netherlands and Karachi for example.

Opening doors: 20.00
Evening starts: 20.30
Overtoom 301, Amsterdam, OT301 Cinema, 2e floor

Program:

Rob van Kranenburg, Jimini Hignett, Suzanne Hogendoorn, Documentary: Grown in Detroit with introduction of the filmmakers: Mascha & Manfred Poppenk

Rob van Kranenburg will discuss 'The breakdown of control and surveillance situations, Police 3.0, the Facebook Generation and Garbage 3.0? What does it mean? '

Detroit is called by some a 'dying city', by others a 'city of hope'. The backbone of industry and the middleclass has left the city in ruins with, in some places gangs ruling and violence in the streets. Yet others are also going to Detroit as they see opportunities for self-organisation. Can we envision a scenario like this coming to cities like Paris, Brussels, Rotterdam? The ingredients seem to be there; a political Weimar situation with ineffective politicians, a deep economic crisis and financial unrest, an enormous loss of industrial jobs, antagonism between different cultural social and religious groups in the cities, and a growing group of young people with bleak prospects for making enough money to support a decent home for their families. Yet are we ready for self- organisation? Just look at Amsterdam and Utrecht. Today - can we do Garbage 3.0 with our I- phones and Facebook buying Foursquare? Aren?t we living with our heads in the clouds. Is this Facebook generation capable of finding a mix of cold and warm solidarity that will also feed generic infrastructures - roads, sewage, garbage collection? ?Come and find out.

Jimini Hignett will present ?How to make art when everything is fucked up??

?Detroit, Friday April 15th ?"Scavenging in an already looted neighbourhood. Rummaging with bare hands through terrifying heaps of DNA swabs, scuffed fingerprint forms and dissolving Polaroid mugshots - a city of individual lives reduced to abandoned files of mouldering paper in the stagnant courthouse. Everything has been left behind? fingerprints, DNA-samples, mugshot photographs, film, sound tapes, missing persons reports, Polaroids of crime locations, padded envelopes containing evidence. The surface of the mugshots is disintegrating, the colours running and bubbling, drifting and corroding. These photographs have a terrible, painful beauty. The way they have been abandoned is such a sharp parallel with the way the people they show have been abandoned ? the carelessness with which their personal information has been discarded, mirroring the lack of care both within the so-called ?justice? system and the world outside. Symbolic perhaps of the lives they represent, left behind by the retreating white authority. They have been left to rot, disintegrate. A mountain of personal information, stories, lives, histories, artefacts, carelessly abandoned. The scene has such clarity as a symbol encapsulating a society gone so wrong, that despite the traumatic post-apocalypticism, it feels disconcertingly like a godsend. But how to go on? How to make art from these images of such pain, such abandonment? How to make art when everything is this fucked up?

Documentary screening: Grown in Detroit
Nature is taking over the city and a new generation is taught to harvest its profit

Before screening introduction by the filmmakers Mascha & Manfred Poppenk and Suzan van Steenwijk

www.grownindetroit.filmmij.nl

Detroit has earned its notorious title as one of the most dangerous cities in the U.S. due to a struggling automotive industry, increasingly high unemployment, poverty, race issues, vacant houses, high crime rates and decreased public services. Places where houses, factories and schools were once thriving are left abandoned because only half of the city's original population remains. In the last fifty years, one of the wealthiest cities in America has transformed into one of the most economically and socially challenged. Where residents once had major supermarkets and affordable, healthy dining, now liquor stores sell groceries from behind bullet-proof glass and fast food restaurants, are rampant. However, amidst all this negativity, where the press hangs on every story, the city and its residents have surprisingly emerged with their own solution.With the destruction of so many abandoned homes, nature has taken over and the city is ?greening? from within.

full synopsis: http://grownindetroit.filmmij.nl/about.php


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