Detroit Research Volume 1

172
From Detroit arises a proliferation of images that detail its extreme economic, material, social
and historical conditions. The si(gh)ts of broken down factories, homes with trees growing
through roofs, vast expanses of land returning to nature, packs of wild dogs, discarded piles of
belongings, etc., bellow a great noise marking the arrival of the decline of capitalism while letting
loose these images to roam the interweb and its reaches. Frequently arises the interjection, Oh,
but I hear it is a great place for artists. Art and the City invite the imaginaries of expansive, empty
spaces, open and unencumbered. The cityscape becomes a site of production where the factory
once was, now derelict and falling away. But, instead of repurposing vacancies to the romantic
melody of the arts, I’d like to leave you with a different set of images with which I am thinking
through the generative potential of an artist’s (and in my case a choreographer’s) studio at this
moment: the Anna Scripps Whitecomb Conservatory on Belle Isle.
Perched within Detroit’s great city park Belle Isle, this conservatory, designed by Albert
Kahn (who also designed a great many automobile assembly plants) in 1904, stands quietly to
absorb the changing of seasons and the handful of visitors who, whispering, pass throughout
its halls. Like much of Detroit in the past 40 years or so, this Conservatory (and its inhabitants)
has been left largely to its own
devices. Run by volunteers
with little to no money from
the city, it illustrates another
version of urban negligence.
Teeming with plants, trees
and flowers from around the
world, a great jolt of oxygen
and fragrant, moist air is the
first confrontation upon arrival.
Trees graze the ceiling
and begin to curve along its
edges. Vines grow embedded
within the structural bars
along the walls. Fruit ripens
and is harvested or falls to
decompose on the dirt floor. Cacti accumulate etchings of a crush’s name like a wooden desktop
would, carved into its grain at a junior high school.
When I enter this space I am reminded of the strangely narcissistic characteristics of a
dance studio, all mirrors and sprung floors. It is a space strategically designed for the arousal
of life energy, a well of creativity. It is a space for movement. Yet, this energy is corralled and
multiplied; it overflows with excess while also keeps to itself. I am reminded of domestic spaces
where privacy veils sensual, relational, and intimate bodily states engaged in a social and corporeal
history of affective and reproductive labor. Where what is produced is intangible, immaterial.
It is a world of scents and colors, of contemplation and sensuality. The Conservatory is a
fertile studio, sanctioned yet unruly, left alone yet filled with life. This is a studio that has been left
outside. This site is my own private dance studio. Windows reveal not the luminosity of what is
beyond, but multiplicity of life within. Alone in the studio I am reminded that I am never alone in
the studio. Within a city that has been left alone, this green house is an ecstatic assemblage of
movement and materiality. Upon entrance the senses awaken: a sensuous intoxication.
Image courtesy of the artist