Take Me Home

Adopting a title inspired by the mission of Detroit Narrative Agency, Disrupting Harm, Building Power features two DNA-supported projects: Solidarity: First Your Liberation And Then Mine, by Karen Cardenas and Erik Paul Howard, and Orlando Ford’s documentary short, Take Me Home. This season accompanies Detroit Narrative Agency’s exhibition Radical Remedies.

Amid national uprisings in support of Black Lives Matter, the introduction of the Breathe Act, and the advancement of the Movement for Black Lives’ policy agenda, many Black-majority cities, Detroit among them, have been purposefully misrepresented by corporate media and elected officials. Solidarity: First Your Liberation And Then Mine responds with a direct account of this critical moment of demonstration, expression, and collective experience. Produced for Inside Southwest Detroit and co-directed by Karen Cardenas and Erik Paul Howard, Solidarity: First Your Liberation And Then Mine documents forty days of solidarity and movement building in Detroit following the murder of George Floyd. Through soundscapes, video footage, and still image sequences, this short film focuses on communities coming together in protest and performance, grounded at the Solidarity Action and Freedom March on Woodward Avenue in Detroit on July 4th, 2020.

Long before this past summer, Detroit has been co-opted as a flashpoint of debate, speculation, and intrigue by mainstream popular culture. In recent years, narratives and media portrayals of Detroit have celebrated a so-called “rebirth” of the city, with influential corporate real estate managers, developers, and city officials as its protagonists. Meanwhile, longtime Black and Brown Detroiters have not only been erased from these official accounts of urban renaissance, but many have been forced out altogether in a direct and visceral way: housing and home ownership. Directed by Orlando Ford and produced by John Sloan, Take Me Home focuses on the foreclosure crisis in Detroit by centering individuals who have been displaced from their homes due to illegal foreclosures and evictions, raising important questions around the political nuance of taxation as a vehicle for representation and community vitality. In addressing a crisis characterized by executive mismanagement and a deep disregard for the everyday lives of the city’s residents, the film explores the complex impact of property ownership in Detroit, and its central role in understanding generational wealth disparity.

As in many of the works produced with the support of Detroit Narrative Agency over the past five years, Take Me Home and Solidarity: First Your Liberation And Then Mine confront the dissonant relationship between ownership and placemaking: as an explicit investigative subject matter on the one hand—as explored in Ford’s documentary—and as an implicit, figurative throughline on the other. One still from Cardenas and Howard’s Solidarity makes a claim to the quasi-public space of city roads and avenues, whose ownership is, in itself, bureaucratically fraught. The image reminds us: “THE REAL POWER IS IN THE STREETS”—suggesting a more suspect, less real performance of power by elected officials, police departments, and corporate interest. The words echo another rallying cry common across the demonstrations, a call-and-response declaration of ownership that asks: “WHOSE STREETS? OUR STREETS!”

By encouraging artists and imagemakers to tell their own stories, DNA asks us to reconsider who owns narratives surrounding Detroit more broadly, and by extension, the power associated with them. Featuring new writing and interviews with the artists published throughout the season, the films in this installment of Daily Rush work to disrupt harmful narratives about Detroit through documentary practices—building power by way of lived experience. Together, Solidarity: First Your Liberation And Then Mine and Take Me Home call on viewers to consider deeply what collective experience and accountability mean in times of immeasurable loss, while interrogating the generations-long struggle to maintain a just relationship between governing bodies, social institutions, and the communities that call this region home.

Curator
Detroit Narrative Agency, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit