ONE Mile Magazine Vol2

O N E M I L E

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ONE MILE PROJECT TEAM Anya Sirota, Bryce Detroit, Halima Cassells, Jean Louis Farges DESIGN DIRECTOR Jean Louis Farges FASHION EDITOR Halima Cassells MUSIC CURATOR Bryce Detroit EDITOR Anya Sirota CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Linda Cassells, Lorena Fogueiredo, James Lesko, Carl Wilson, Anya Sirota, Halima Cassells, Samantha Okolita, Samba Jones, CaldodeCultivo, Masimba Hwati, Jean Louis Farges, Bryce Detroit, Carleton Gholz, Paul Chandler, Bashair Pasha PHOTOGRAPHY Jean Louis Farges, Hubert Watkins, Desmond Love, Doug Coombe ARTWORK Ian Donaldson, Carl Wilson, Masimba Hwati, Sam Okolita, Jonathan Watkins, YT Oh, Linnea Cook, Jay Dragon TRANSCRIPTIONS Bashair Pasha, Arvinder Singh COVER Efe Bes photographed by Jean Louis Farges ASSISTANT COPY EDITOR Bashair Pasha GENERAL INQUIRIES + CREATIVE SERVICES info@onemile.org copyright © ONE Mile printed in Michigan by First Impression

EDITORS’ NOTE Welcome to issue 2 of ONE Mile Magazine

Over the last year ONE Mile became increasingly interested in the question of “how do people make things, sounds, spaces, and ideas in the North End and in Detroit at large” – a question that we began to address in the inaugural issue of the ONE Mile Magazine, in which we focused on a small sample of design, art, music, and culture locally rooted in Detroit’s epic North End. At the same time, we became more and more aware that so many amazing people were doing exceptional, self-initiated, experimental, political, impactful, intrepid, collective and vital projects and activities... We wanted to tell all their stories.

The second issue of the ONE Mile Magazine takes a closer look at the question of making: how people are making, what people are making, why people are making, to what ends, and with what means, against what challenges. In exposing the motivations and processes that guide Detroit’s grass roots makers – salient portraits of a neighborhood, its residents, and by and large, the city begin to take shape. The people who have shared their experiences and work are inspirations to us, and we are very pleased to communicate their narratives throughout Detroit and beyond.

We, at ONE Mile, have been staying busy making things ourselves. Since launching our project two years ago, we’ve released a Magazine, salvaged a garage, built a Mothership, introduced a fellowship program for local artists, and converted a barbershop into a community gathering spot. We’ve provided support to the Oakland Avenue Urban Farm and their ambitious project to create an economically sustainable cultural landscape in the North End. We’ve helped launch the Detroit Afrikan Music Institution and its offshoot programs.

We’ve hosted dozens of events featuring local artists and performers, building a powerful network of engaged and active individuals. Thanks to everyone who has taken part in this incredible experiment, and to those encountering ONE Mile for the first time, we look forward to crossing paths.

Editorial team

summer 2016

CON FEATURED VISIONARIES

N’neka Jackson: Astral Accessory ArtistT 18 Efe Bes: Detroit’s Synchronal Intergalactic PolythythmacistY 30 Yolanda Green: At the Apex 42 Carl Wilson: My Portion of Territory 68 Jonnie Ujama Page: Drawing Dark Objects 130

VERSE Za’Nyia Kelly: Illuminate 124 Bryce Detroit: #DETROITAFRIKAN 136

TENTS CULTURAL LANDSCAPES

Lorena Figueiredol: Wild Things 74 Dr. Carleton S. Gholz: Jazz Archaeology 82 Akoaki: Pink or Gold?

100 GOING GLOBAL Documenting Detroit 94 Masimba Hwati: A Time to Project and Pro-Act New Images, Sounds and Narratives? Black Detroit 114

NEW ECONOMY Paul Chandler: Welcome to Detroit 92 Halima Cassells: Free Market 98 Ann Carter: AfroJam 110

FEATURED VISIONARIES Over the past years, Detroit has captured everyone’s imagination. First, as a paradigmatically Modern city gone bust: surviving an automobile industry bailout, the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, and a virtual dissolution of its democratic system of governance. More recently, Detroit has emerged as a turnaround city: its radically devalued real estate and seemingly limitless neo-rural landscapes rebranded as a test bed for speculative redevelopment and urban experimentation. The revivalist turn, though vital to the normalization of a distopic, economically challenged urban scenario, has drawn its fair share of criticism. With blight remediation and private revitalization reaching a fever pitch, critics and residents alike worry that Detroit’s distinct Afro-diasporic cultural heritage, its counter-histories, and obscured working class narratives might be white washed, or worse, altogether erased.

Against this mutable and precarious contemporary scenario, ONE Mile brings together its Featured Visionaries series: intimate stories behind Detroit’s creative leaders, their thoughts, perceptions, provocations, and strategies. As a collection, these personal narratives inspire us, revealing a city that is culturally endowed, vanguard, and anything but a blank slate.

Hound me, Fox you: A Guide to Counter Foxiness, a design project exploring the politics of aesthetic and the migrant crisis.

By YT Oh, Jay Dragon and Linnea Cook. learn more at renardie.wix.com/counter-fox & pitcrit.com/hound-me-fox-you-a-guide-to-counter-foxiness/

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N’NEKA JACKSON ASTRAL ACCESSORY ARTIST

interview Halima Cassells & Bashair Pasha photography Jean Louis Farges

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Nneka Jackson’s custom creations are both regal and empowering, bringing together mythical flash with whimsical futurism. Her embellished aggregates, taking the form of hybridized crowns, wings, masks, and other astonishing corporal ornaments, are inspired by legends, butterflies, intangible legacies and above all a deep awareness of beauty. We met up with Nneka at the appropriately regal Fisher Building to talk about real and projected function of ornament.

NJ: Thank you!

HC: So what’s new? what are you working on like right now?

NJ: Most of what I do is kind of different. I try to keep my work separate from what other people are doing. I use a lot of inspirations like McQueen, I love his work. So, I want to get back into working on some more wings, some more crowns. Way more elaborate. So, I’m just coming up with ideas now.

HC: What other big names do you follow? You mentioned McQueen?

HC: Where did your inspiration come from and how did you get started?

NJ: Oh, that’s an easy question. I’ve actually been creating since I was a little girl, but it was more so making things for myself. It wasn’t until I started wearing my things out that people started to notice. And it would be like “oh my god, where did you get that?” And, then my daughter was born, and that was really magnified everything. And I would make handmade pieces, so she was a newborn wearing jewelry, and the nurses in there would just go crazy.

NJ: I love Lanvin, I love so many. I love fashion in general. I’ll watch some of the shows, like Paris or London. I was actually invited to London Fashion Week several years ago, but that’s not the kind of thing that you can half-step. You have to come in that with everything perfect, but I didn’t do that show. I will eventually... But I will watch the fashion in other countries to see what they’re doing. And colors! Colors are really important to me. I’ll take a trip to Barnes and Noble just to look at all the magazines from all over the world, to see what fashion is doing.

BP: Did you start out making jewelry?

BP: Is that what you’re interested in- fashion?

NJ: No, I actually draw, sculpt, and I sew. I make all sorts of stuff.

It just progressed so much that most of what I do now is like accessories and wings and things like that. And crowns.

NJ: Well, because I do jewelry, the accessories match the fashion.

I want to see what colors are in style. That’s how I keep up with what’s going on in different seasons. Because, generally, when you’re speaking of fashion, what they show on the runway is for the upcoming season. So, that’s how I keep up with what’s going on, and try to make sure that what I’m doing fits in.

HC: Love your crowns!

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BP: In the progression of your work, how did you eventually come to making accessories?

It’s changed so much because I’m self taught. It would’ve been different if I had gone top a university where they had a timelinelike “Okay, this is what you’ll do this year, this is what you’ll do next year”. For me, it’s what catches my eye, what I see in my dreams. Things that I like to make, like I may see something I like and say, “I want to try that,” and so that’s how I actually got into it. Because, in the beginning, I was drawing, I was sculpting, I was sewing little things, but then it was, “can I do that”? Then it was, “I can do that! Okay, so let me try something else.” So that’s I how moved onto different things. It’s basically just trial and error.

HK: Where did you get that confidence?

NJ: Oh my goodness, my grandmother. My grandmother was the rock of my family. She was where our creativity comes from.

My mother was also an artist, though she’s a nurse. That’s were it originated from. My grandmother was the type of woman, because she was a teacher, she had to come p with these brilliant ideas to get these children engaged, and she brought those ideas home to us. We never knew what we were going to come home to. There was one time she decided to paint the house mint green and chocolate brown. Imagine what that looked like! And her reason was, “it’s only paint -- if you don’t like it, paint over it”. I’m the same way. It’s only paint, it’s only beads, it’s only fabric. If I don’t like it, start over. And sometimes, there are some pieces that I absolutely hate and everyone else loves.

I look at it and I’m like, this could be a little different, I could’ve done that a little bit different. But what is perfect, know? Perfect, in my world, it doesn’t exist. And even my children have that same mentality. I’ve always stuck out like a sore thumb, because, I’m so eclectic. Normal is not me, what is considered normal is just not me. So, I’ve always taught my children be you. Even if you stick out, that’s okay. We’re not all meant to be copycats of everyone else. And that’s how they are… They all have different personalities. It’s wonderful.

NJ: You mentioned you were asked to do London Fashion Week?

NJ: Yes, and it was an amazing email to get, I’ll say that, because I was formerly on a Project Runway’s spinoff show about accessories. Many moons ago, they had a casting in Chicago.

And I took the bus all the way to Chicago because you know,

it’s just right there down the street.... So I said, I’ll never know how good I can be unless I try, And so, when I got there I was so nervous. I was among some any amazing accessory designers, and there were three rounds. I told myself, I’m not going to cry, because I’m a crier. So I got through the first round, I was so excited. At that time I had just gotten on Facebook, and I’m updating everyone in Detroit, like maybe, I got through the first round. Second round, I made it through. Final round is when you go before the panel of judges that are going to be on the show. So I had my portfolio and I had some of my pieces with me. And when I handed them my pieces, they didn’t want to give them back. They said the saw me on runways in Paris, they saw me travelling around the world. They couldn’t believe that, first of all, I was this designer that was from Detroit, Michigan.

They could not believe that. And so, we had seven days to make a video. I wanted them to see the beauty here, to understand why I am the way I am. I’m from Michigan, and from Detroit, Michigan. My grandmother taught at Highland Parkfor well over twenty years, my mother graduated from there, and she was born there. And when I made this video I went all over, I wanted to show them the beauty here: the Children’s museum, the African American Museum, and I showed them Belle Isle. I just wanted them to understand what you see I the media is not what Detroit is. It’s such a melting pot, people don’t understand that. I’ve been fortunate to live in other places in the United States, and I’ve never seen a community like the one here. My circle is so large that I mingle with poets, I mingle with painters, I mingle with architects, I mingle with electricians, I mingle with so many people who are able to influence my work. I don’t see being able to get that any place else. It’s amazing, and I want the world to constantly know of the amazingness that is here.

BP: How did the video turn out?

The video was amazing. I didn’t get one the show, but the video came out amazing. I still watch it from time to time to see the growth. Not only in myself, but also in my work. But to hear someone validate my work, whoever that may be. There are people who can be your friends, who will say “I love it,” because they love you. But here’s someone who never met me, and they literally did not want to give me my pieces back, they were holding on to them saying “this is amazing, how did you do this?” and I’m crying, because I was determined not to cry. It was amazing to get to that point, to have them validate my work that way.

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And to then, get that invitation to do Fashion Week. I don’t regret that decision. Because it was either focus all my energy on doing that show in London, or miss my son’s high school graduation. Or, to just wait. I know the opportunity will come back around. It’s a one in a lifetime thing, to see your child graduate high school. And even more so for me, because a lot of people don’t know. I became a parent at 13. So, there are always all of these stigmas placed on you when you have a child that young. You’ll never graduate high school, you’ll never go to college, you’ll never have a family, and you’ll never start a business. And all of these things that were placed on me as things I would never do, it was like, I don’t fit into a box.

So it’s fine that you have all these ideas of who you think I am, but let me show you who I am. So, when people meet my children, they’re completely blown away because it’s not what they expect. Because, society says what my children should be. Let my children show you who they are.

I don’t regret not going, because I was able to be in the front row to see my son graduate. And I was hoarse after we left, I was so excited, He got a full ride scholarship, he also plays instruments. I’ve been able to pass on my artistic abilities onto my children, as well as music. I’ve always been a firm believer in the importance of music and art in children, in addition to the academics, because it does something to their minds where they’re able to understand concepts better. They see the world completely differently. I didn’t have that. And my boys got full ride scholarships to go to school. My second oldest did not take his scholarship. Because initially he wanted to go into nursing, and Wayne State had an amazing nursing program. He said, as a male I have more of a chance to get scholarships because I’m a minority. So he had a plan, I couldn’t disagree with that. But I’ve always wanted them to see the world, and know that the world is much bigger than their backyard. We were a military family for a long time, so my children have gotten to travel and see how big the US is. But they haven’t seen the world. So I’ve always pushed them, like “I’m here. I’m always going to be here. Come back and Come back and visit on Christmas and Thanksgiving, but see the world.”

JLF: If you could have a magic wish to change or preserve on thing in Detroit, what would it be?

NJ: There are so many things I would change: one of the first ones is education. When I was a child, I wouldn’t be who I was without some of the phenomenal teachers I had in my life that were there to push me, that were there to challenge me. That were there to say “I’m proud of you.”

It’s not the same now, because they cut the budgets so much so the children just test all the time, basically. So I would definitely change a lot of things in terms of education. And art is no longer as important as math, for example. I have children who have no art classes in school. Because there are no art teachers to teach them. They won’t hire the art teachers to teach art, they’ll hire them to be substitutes, to teach English. I have a best friend who spent 12 years in college, to be able to teach k-12, and while she was teaching, they had her teaching Social Studies and English.

She had a cart she could push around to teach art for fifteen, twenty minutes. And trying to teach art appreciation to kids in the eighth grade who’ve never had an art class before, ever… it’s really tough.

I’ve seen this city change over the years. When I was little it was completely different. It’s funny flipping through pictures and seeing places where I grew up that no longer exist. My high school is being torn down as we speak. They started tearing down my high school two weeks ago. The city of Highland Park no longer has a high school. It no longer has one. And my mother graduated from the city of Highland Park. People don’t understand that the city of Highland Park was built because of the Model T factory that was there. It was actually built for the workers to have some place to live close to the factory. They had their own water treatment facility, their own college. My mom got her first nursing degree form Highland Park. And to see it now, I would definitely change that. There’s so many things I would like to change, but that’s one of the main ones.

George Mckenney photographed by Jenny Risher

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above: Kristina Theglamtech photographed by Timothy Paule; the model styled her own hair; MUA by Khrissy facing page: Kevlar photographed by Maria Popivanova; wardrobe by Kristina Theglamtech

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JLF: And there was robust arts education in the city when you were growing up?

NJ: Yes, education and music. I can’t say just art. Music and art go hand in hand in a way that I can’t explain. It’s a feeling that you get, when you hear a piece of music. I’m not going to cry today.

HC: It’s okay.

NJ: I used to play with my sister, we were violinist. I was first violin and so was she.

And my sister passed away at the age of 17 when I was 15. She caught a virus called Gulliam Bare’ Syndrome and complications from sickle cell disease. She went into crisis, and it killed her in seven days… and for a while it hurt to play. The music was gone.

But I would hear certain songs that we used to play together, and it would bring all of those memories back.

JL: So do you think that music is part of inspiration in the work you do.

NJ: Of course, there’s a lot of times I’ll be listening to music when I’m creating. So it’s a definite, co-relation with my work.

Because even the shows that I do, the music that I sew along with the fashion. For me, when I do my accessories, it’s more so wearable art than anything. And, I want you to leave my shows feeling something. No matter what that feeling is, I want you to remember my show. I’ve been able to do that over the years. When I do a show, people remember it. They remember it, they remember something from it: my wings, a certain piece of jewelry, they remember. Music helps with that memory, because just hearing that music brings back the show. And with this community here, we’re surrounded by musicians, all different genres of musicians.

BP: What kind of music do you use in your shows?

NJ: Oh, everything. From classical to rock to house music. I love house music. I love, love, love it. R&B! The other issue is, everyone wants everything to fit into a box. There are all these subgenres of music. Like neo-soul and I listen to everything, whatever catches my ear and whatever catches my heart. I even love Indian music. I cannot wait to go to India. You have no idea.

The Taj Mahal, I have to see the Taj Mahal. And I have to go to Mumbai because I’m in love with Bollywood. Like, absolutely in love, I drive people insane.

BP: So tell us a little bit about the crowns you make.

NJ: How that started is, I believe we all wear invisible crowns. And it helps with our royalty as women. Because sometimes it becomes hard to hold your head up, because sometime the world wants you to lower your head. And I said, how can I make those invisible crowns real? And that’s how I started. So now my crowns are not invisible. I actually started one today.

JLF: Everyone is talking, from all over Europe and the US, about how Detroit is the center of art, the center of contemporary culture, the center of everything. Do you feel like you have made any new connections? Have you experience any benefit from what everyone is saying about Detroit-the-It-City? Do you feel like there is more support of your work now than maybe five or ten years ago?

NJ: I will say there is more support of artists here. But I want to point out, it’s not new. We’ve been here, we’ve been doing everything that we’re doing now, all this time. The world is just finding out we exist, but we’ve existed for a long time. But there is more support. And as more people come from different countries and are exposed to what happens here, they’re able to take it

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to other places in the world. Then they’re able to understand what’s going on here. But, it’s not new. Not by any means. A lot of people think that it’s new, because they’re newly exposed to it. But I’ve been who I am for years, and I’m old. It’s important to understand that the magic that’s here has been here for so long, it’s not new. So when you see the slogans that say the new Detroit, that’s not new. It’s real old.

BP: So walk us through a day, or a week in your line of work.

Yeah, you can’t really do it in a day. When you own your business, especially a business where you’re producing art, you don’t just do your work and go home. A day for me can consist of making several pieces or reaching out on social media, because you have to run social media. I will say that that IT HAS BEEN AN AMAZING THING for my business, word of mouth, has been a wonderful thing. If you’re really good at what you do and you’re good at taking care of the people who support you, they’ll continue to support you and tell other people about what you’re doing. Sometimes people don’t understand because you make these things, you’ve got to be marketing, you’ve got to make them, you got to get supplies, so I don’t sleep much.

In addition to that, being a parent, I really don’t sleep much.

Because I always wanted to be the parent that’s there. When they have a recital, I’m there. When they have a parent teacher conference, I’m there. When the school has a play, and they need someone to make stuff, that’s me. So it could be I have several customers that I have to see, throughout the week, it could just be getting orders, or posting photos of work that I’m doing. I try to keep photographic records of the things that I’ve done, particularly on social media... So of course sometimes over the course of a week it runs together. It’s like, I’ll start it on Monday and I’ll look up and it’s Friday, and I’ll be like, oh my God, where did my week go? So, it just all depends on what I have to do.

the wings. My daughter says they’re all hers anyway. It could be a little bit of any of those things, in any given week. And if I have a show coming up, magnify that by twenty. Because you have rehearsals to go to, and different things like that.

BP: What projects are you working on right now?

NJ: I did a couple pieces that are going to be in a magazine soon.

I’m working on a lot of tribal pieces. I love tribal stuff. I love stuff from other countries. I did a show called “My Hair, My Story, My Glory”, which is basically a story from the African American perspective: where our hair came from, where our hairstyles came from. I did costumes for that show as well as accessories.

It was a really amazing show. We did three different shows over the last couple years where we’ve shown three different periods in history, to tell the story of where we came from. And they’re actually talking about doing another one. I would like to see that show travel, because a lot of us don’t know why we wear our hair the way we do.

BP : Thanks so much for meeting us.

NJ: You are so welcome. Thank you so much to ONE Mile for your support. A lot of times you don’t get as much support or respect as an artist than if you were, say, a doctor. It’s amazing to have organizations like ONE Mile to support you. I really appreciate that.

BP: How can people find you?

NJ: I’m on Facebook, N’neka Jackson on Facebook, I’m on instagram @bflyy7 and I have a website now, nneka.com, you can actually see a variety of pieces of my work.

When I’m working on wings in particular, it usually takes three weeks to make one pair. So a lot of sewing is going on, because I don’t use feathers, I use material. I hand cut it to look like feathers. Playing around with the fact that feathers are heavy, I don’t know how birds fly. It was easier to be able to cut fabric, because it makes it more comfortable for the wearer, so a lot of time I’ve had trial and error on my children, who get to wear

Leah Li photographed by Tyrone Holmes; Mua: Faces by Rochelle Darlene; hair by Kristina Theglamtech

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above: Diane Taylor photographed by Leisha Self; MUA by Taylor Ashford; hair collection by Valley Girl Hair; hair stylist @exquisitecookie; wardrobe by @spoiledforever facing page: Ashley Monique photographer by Tyrone Holmes; Mua : Faces by Rochelle Darlene; hair by Kristina Theglamtech

EFE BES DETROIT’S SYNCHRONAL INTERGALACTIC POLYRHYTHMACIST

interview Bryce Detroit & Jean Louis Farges photography Desmond Love

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“People say it all

comes from Africa, and it does!”

When Efe drums, time stops. Or more precisely it folds on itself. Using a 15 drums assemblage, Efe transports us -- channeling deep ancestral beats and creating vanguard, prescient grooves.

It happens all at once, and all sorts of transcendent pulsation are suddenly activated. Bryce Detroit and Jean Louis Farges, co-founders of the Detroit Afrikan Music Institution, met up with Efe at ONE Mile Garage, where he and his shape shifting group iBm (Intelligent Buti Muzic) practice and perform regularly. Taking a break from his intense practice and performance schedule, Efe shared his thoughts about ancestral sounds, emergent genres, and putting the drum in the forefront of sonoric, cultural experimentation.

Bryce Detroit: What do you want people to understand? What is iBm? What do you want folks to understand?

Efe Bes: iBm (Intelligent Buti Muzic) is necessary to take music from where it’s at to where it needs to be, in order for Africa to be a factor in the music, as far as African people. The way to do that is by putting the drummers in the forefront, and the rest of the band would be able to necessarily expand their music. Right now, most musicians are playing, they try to create different things, but they’re not using the drum as their guideline, or their leader. Some other instrument is leading, and there is no way a European instrument can lead me. It can’t happen. Because the tones aren’t designed for that. The tones are designed to mostly quiet down African music. All the European instruments are twice as loud as their African counterparts and that’s what it’s for. So iBM will by design necessarily take music to another place where it hasn’t been taken.

BD: Okay, so one thing, me having known you for some years now, I know that the music and culture you create, you do that on purpose and on a level it can be looked at as a direct response to an absence of something in the environment. So can you please speak to the inspiration, like what is the motivating factor that had you even enter this realm? As Efe Bes and doing what are you doing and why?

EB: Inspiration is my ancestors and the absence of my ancestors in the whole “research”, “rebirth”, or whatever terminology you use to describe what black people here in America are doing.

The ancestors and the material culture is missing. People say it all comes from Africa. It does. So it has to be in the music. It has to be something visual. It has to be something auditory…

There is not a drummer on this planet that can command that kind of attention because people don’t look to drummers for “inspiration”. They look to saxophone players, guitar players, trumpet players, and piano players. They don’t look to drummers for their inspiration. But the drum is something that when applied properly, you can’t refute it. From children to elders, everybody is going to move to it. So that’s basically my inspiration: that void that was created by wiping out our culture. It’s a huge void.

There is so much room for musicians, storytellers, artists doing something similar but in truth, until it’s deemed relevant by the majority, people are going to stay away from it. This is the first thing they ask when I tell people I want to play in front of their business: “What kind of instruments you got? What are you playing?” So I generally take the kora in— and I don’t even play the kora. But once they give me the okay, it doesn’t matter. I play my drums, and they love it.

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I hear that drum, it corresponds to another drum and the next drum… So people say how do you figure out which drum to play.

And I say you don’t have to figure it out because it is what it is; the sound is there, you know. It’s basically a three-drum system.

In groove, it’s three, so three-six-nine-twelve, you know.

And that is another focus to get people to understand that the drum IS an instrument that you can actually be used to do what other instruments are doing, you know. The American trap set drums are just that: the drummer is basically trapped with just keeping time. I don’t get how...

BD: So, real quick, I want to ask a question about the instruments a bit more. Your kit is impressive just by the size of it. Also, just the way it looks compared to what would be considered, traditional African drum setup, it just looks totally different. Talk about how was your kit comprised? What are the implications of the kit that is put together the way yours is, because there are got to be some implications that relate to that kit and conventional African drumming.

EB: The kit that I have actually came about out of necessity. I didn’t start out wanting to be a solo drummer. But out of the rejection from the African city community, I gravitated more to the bass drum because when I went to the African Centre of Performances, I didn’t really hear the bass drum. I was listening for it, but I couldn’t hear it; I kept hearing the djembe. So I said, “Well I am going to get drums that communicate with people”— whether they want to hear it or not and base it on something you can’t deny. That’s why hip-hop is so successful, and that’s why I use hip-hop as a part of iBm and that’s why I stress to the musicians to be heavy on the bass. And they aren’t really getting it because they have never been really told that… As far as the

JLF: Alright, could you talk a little bit more about your personally as an artist? You spoke about the drum and how you use the drum. You uplift the performance and the importance of the drum is an instrument, too. In that way, your way of looking at the drums brought to mind the question of melodies, which is for sure a distinct thing in your sound. What is the relationship between melody and drums... because for some, drum as a melody is an oxymoron.

EB: I remember someone telling me that you don’t need a microphone because drums don’t play melodies. And I said, “mine do”. She said, “I don’t know... you aren’t playing it tonight”, or something like that. So the next time she heard me playing my drum, she really said, “I never thought I would be dancing on the streets like this”. But the melody aspect is what I see is really missing from the drummers’ approach to the music. The average drummer doesn’t even tune his drum before playing the average kit. I’ve watched very few tuning their drums because they are not focused on playing melodies, they are focused on playing a particular part of the song, and that’s not my intention.

I have to focus on it just like every other musician so that if all the musicians drop out, you still hear some music coming from the drums. That’s what I try to stress to all the musicians, the bass player included: if I drop out, we should be able to still keep it going because you should have a melody in your instrument.

Melody is something that I learned from DJ’ing. That’s the way I actually learn the songs. If I’m playing my favorite things, I’m hearing the melody and I am going to recreate it. Once we get

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Jean Louis Farges: Do you find that when people hear you, they intuitively feel the melody or hear the melody? Like for me, before coming in contact with you, yes I was aware of tuning the drum, but it was always in context of just being in being in support of a melody or harmony. So with your kit, it is real clear how each drum has its own pitch. Do you find that people immediately come in contact with that when they hear your sound?

EB: What I have noticed is that if I pay attention as a musician storyteller, watching the people more. I do that when I am playing drums so that way I can pick up what people are feeling.

If I’m playing something, and I see the people aren’t feeling it, I’ll switch it up. I am not playing for me, and that’s what the storyteller musicians need to get out of performances. They aren’t playing for them, and that’s where the big drawback is. Big cats will say, “I’ll play it for myself”. That is okay if you’re getting paid to do that and if you have followers and that’s what they accept, that’s okay. But that’s not how you are going to get this music to the masses. That’s what every other band is doing— African music, Cuban drumming, they are doing it. But they are doing it for a specific group of people. They aren’t doing it for everybody. That has never been my intention. People will say, “Your music sounds like house”, and they think they are putting me down. But that is my intent.

BD: So what is iBm? Since you say you don’t make music for yourself you make it for the people. So what is iBm doing for the people?

EB: It connects the people who don’t really give a damn about Africa to Africa, by default. Because if you like iBm, you like African music. You just may not be aware of that, but there is no way you can say that what I am doing isn’t African. Somebody

can try and say it, but they cannot prove it. The first drummer didn’t have a damn DJ, and every drumming that has come up [since], came up by somebody creating it. I am equipped to create a form of music as anybody, and what gives you that information is having all the actual material culture, because you can’t pick a material culture and take something from it. If you’re in tune, you pick up the energy if you pay attention, and that’s what’s being communicated in the drums.

BD: Alright, so one thing that anybody who listened to Efe for ten minutes knows is that Efe says exactly what is in Efe’s heart and in Efe’s mind and for conventional audiences, it is like difficult, you know what I am saying like, complex systems sometimes.

Everybody knows that Efe got something to say at any given time, and it’s usually some shit like yo, you know what I mean, only Efe say that. If you had a podium, what would you wanna tell the masses at any given time?

EB: The message that I have is if you don’t embrace your culture, nobody will embrace you. And the easiest way to embrace your culture is through your music, through your creations. If it’s not evident in your creations, you can talk about embracing it, but you have not internalized it. And that’s the thing that’s keeping us together, the African people… You know, I have to speak up for the African Diasporic people. White people don’t have to say that. It’s, by default, who they are speaking for. If you don’t believe it, go to any of these meetings and see if anybody is bringing up African culture. That needs to be put at the forefront for us to be relevant at these meetings. When people do entertainment, you have to embrace your culture, that’s the main thing. And when people say, “what is the culture?”, the culture is animism, prior to Islam, and Christianity… That is what the culture is. People say there are a lot of different cultures. That’s

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somebody who is reading books. They don’t understand that if you look at all these people, you are going to see the same types of mass, statues, beads, textiles. Everybody is into spirituality, into divinity, something beyond what they can grasp, and when you have people with more knowledge about the material world, you have a problem. You have serious problems.

JLF: Do you see the music you created as a reflection of the city of Detroit?

EB: It’s definitely a part of the city of Detroit, because a lot of my musical influences are picked up in the city of Detroit. For almost sixty years, I’ve been inundated with music from Detroit. I listen to it, I dance to it, I have it on my hard drive. So it has to come out, and it does in some kind of fashion. But what’s really missing in this city is that nobody wants to speak openly about what my music is, because to speak openly about my music is to say that what was being done prior was not connecting to the whole community, and not just focusing on the few that understand a certain type of music or dance. I mean yesterday there were people from around here who never seen me play before and one guy said, “I gotta come watch you play again man, I gotta come back and watch you play”. He was shaking his head, and he didn’t know what to say, but he had to say something.

That’s one of my biggest inspirations right there. Celeste, my manager. She listens to my music and says it’s not alright. But I’m just understanding the psychology, I know I understand. And it’s not even intentional. When you ask people to hear drums, you are asking them something different. Nobody has ever been forced to listen to the drums. Since you’ve been living, have you listened to a drummer for an hour or so in America?

JLF: No. EB: Yeah, it’s a different thing… peoples’ ears aren’t tuned to that. They’re not expecting it. As a matter of fact, if you tell somebody to listen to a drum for an hour, they will be like okay I will see you when you come back.... ONE Mile has given me this opportunity that no body in the city has given me outside of Dabls and Rockys. Those are the three places: ONE Mile, Dabls and Rocky’s. But ONE Mile is the first place that has given me an indoor venue to have my gratitude and to do what I do and make me a necessary thing. I mean anybody who looks at the state of us, in this city or any city and thinks we got a full hold on entertainment. They trippin’, they trippin’. But I can go open up any major act that has ever been, in the world anywhere, with or without my band, because I understand what people wanna hear. I can play faster than what you can hear. But nobody will hear that shit. I see drummers and hear drummers doing a lot of times, but you can’t hear no melody. All you can see is their hands, and you’re like damn, wow, but after its over with, what did it do? It showcased the person’s talent. But it did not do anything. It may have inspired some other child to get that because that child wants an approval. That’s why I tell people if you don’t like it get your ears checked. I know what I am doing.

I don’t care about the applause. I even got a sign on my drums that says tips are more necessary than hand claps. And we need to stop teaching our children that, you know, you should do well and doing well means getting a bunch of hand claps.

catch Efe Bes regularly at the ONE Mile Garage and the Detroit African Bead Museum; follow events on DAMI and ONE Mile FB for exact dates and performance times.

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YOLANDA GREEN ENTREPRENEUR, COMMUNITY ADVOCATE

interview Bryce Detroit photography Jean Louis Farges

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“What does the Apex Bar mean to you today?”

“ It’s a legacy of ownership.

For me, it’s about ownership, perseverance, and determination, because I watched my mother and father...” says Yolanda Green Bryce Detroit: Maintaining this cultural institutional -- the Apex Bar -- for all of the years... through the economic downturn and the current climate of gentrification and undervaluing, you’ve kept this legendary venue alive and in tact. It’s a powerful thing to have black women ownership of a world impacting cultural institution: there’s an economic piece to your story, there’s a cultural piece to your story, and there’s a family piece. I am really interested in all angles of the story because the Apex is a

part of the Detroit music economy and the Detroit music legacy.

Conserving the space, not just preserving it: keeping places like the Apex active, keeping them sustainable so that everybody involved is growing community benefits -- it is so important and so challenging. Right now, you, United Sound with Danielle and Shanita are really conserving, holding on to major pieces of our black world legacy in music. I want to uplift it and acknowledge it, and express how important it is to all of us, from a musician from a producer from a music economy standpoint from a black man’s standpoint, it’s very important to all of us to have these institutions so that we can still be furthering our culture and our economy in the ways that we used to.

Yolanda Green: So for me, I remember being in the Apex, I remember the Sugar Hill, and I remember Phelps Lounge. Those establishments were very active when I was a child. My father actually didn’t acquire the Apex Saloon until I was about 16.

You’re talking thirty-five years ago, is when my father actually acquired it. Initially he was in business with four gentlemen. But they all died off unfortunately, so he ended up being the sole proprietor of the bar.

My father pretty much ran the Apex until 1995. He passed away in 1995 and at that time my mother took it over. But prior to my mom taking it over, I guess some of the memories I have are a lot of parties. I remember blues and some jazz bands coming in and performing there. Does Sassy Wilson ring a bell? She used to live right there on Hague; she had a blues band and would come in from time to time know matter who was there. She used to bring her live band here and they would play for us. She would also, every year, have her birthday party here and have a live

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concert. I have to be honest with you, the history of all of those individuals would come through there... but of course that was way before my time. My mom or my dad might remember.

YG: There is a church that sits right there on Cameron, right on that corner there. Right now it’s nothing.

Bryce: What kind of music did they play there?

We have a lot of family that’s there for me. Prior to my father having a bar, my mom and I didn’t frequent bars. That’s just not what we did. Of course, when my father took it over, we decided we wanted to have events. Why take it outside? Why not bring the business to our own establishment? We’ve had anything from baby showers to parties to wedding receptions. We’ve had all those different things from our family and people in the community. At one point in time the upstairs used to be, I guess I’ll say, operational. They used to use that space and play cards and stuff on that side.

BD: So when Oakland had Phelps, Sugar Hill and Apex…

YG: And Bob’s Bar. BD: Where was Bob’s Bar? YG: Bob’s Bar was at Cameron and Clay. So you know where the BP is?

BD: Yep.

YG: I’ve I only been to Bob’s Bar once. But I will tell you from what I’ve seen, that bar used to be a little bit more visited than the other bars for me. Phelps was the lounge where the stars came in and they would have concerts and things. When Bob’s went out, it became Apex and Sugar Hill. Then when I guess Sugar Hill went away, and it became the Apex.

BD: Sugar Hill. I’ve heard about Sugar Hill. What did you know about Sugar Hill?

YG: Competition, that’s all I know. It was competition! It was across the street. The only thing that I know is the gentleman that owned it, he and my dad knew each other for years...

BD: Were people coming to the avenue more at that time for the “bar-ness” of it, or was it still like this music vibe of the whole strip?

YG: Oh, I think it was music. I really do think it was music because it was being fanned down from the Phelps. There was a lot of traffic flowing in. And think it was definitely music.

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BD: So Phelps really was like an anchor institution?

YG: Yes, I really do think so because you had some really high profile individuals that performed at the Phelps. I remember being little, and I didn’t know who the people were at the time. I remember the sign, it always had somebody different with the big sign with the lights going around and, you know, there was talk that this particular person was going to be here this weekend.

You would hear people say, “Are you going to the Phelps Lounge this weekend?” So I think that it was the anchor.

Jean Louis Farges: And were people coming from the whole city?

Or was it really a local venue?

YG: And after that it was just stores and traffic all the way down. If you come back down where I am, the Shvitz Club that is still there, that used to be popping. Then if you go behind the Schvitz, that’s Mount Vernon. There was a store there; one of our neighbors owned a party store there. Across the street there was another little party store. There used to be a hardware store right there on the corner. There was a barbershop, then houses, then a little apartment complex, then church, then it was Sugar Hill, then you’re over here at Apex. Coming back up the street, there was a liquor store called Gasman’s. So there was a lot of stuff looking down the street.

YG: People were coming everywhere in the city.

BD: Around what time did the first major signs of businesses and people leaving and Oakland Avenue beginning to look…

JLF: Even outside Detroit?

YG: The crime? I think when Phelps Lounge closed.

YG: I think so. I mean some of the community, yes! But I think the people were coming from places outside the source.

BD: So that’s ’88 or ’89?

YG: Oh, we had a lot of businesses. The avenue was active because you had businesses all the way from the boulevard down to Highland Park, businesses. Do you know where Red’s Shoe Shine is?

YG: When Phelps Lounge closed. I think it was sustaining the area. People from everywhere were coming. It started there and just one by one you started to see things go away. I have to be honest with you, during that time that it was still thriving; I was away at college. I was gone for two years from ‘82-‘84. So I came back home and lived with my parents in the neighborhood and I worked at Wayne State. That’s pretty much when it all started going down. I remember that.

BD: Yeah.

JLF: When did your dad take over the bar?

YG: It’s down closer to Holbrook now. But it used to be closer down to.

YG: thirty-five years ago, so 1981.

BD: How packed would these streets be? What would it look like as far as people walking? How many businesses were still there?

JLF: Did you know the owner before?

BD: Kenilworth, Leicester?

YG: What I am remembering is right there on Philadelphia there was an auto mechanic shop. Right up from the auto mechanic shop there was this family, they owned a Laundromat as well as a party store. So all that was connected from Philadelphia to Hague. Then across the street, there was a funeral home that is still sitting there now. And across the street from the funeral home, there was another store called Laura’s Party Store. And then it was the Dairy Queen.

BD: That’s about to open back up.

YG: I knew his name. I just knew his name. Actually before my father had it, the actual owner wasn’t really active in business.

I think he was leasing property and letting somebody else run it. He was just collecting the money. I guess what I would say probably for my dad, the bar probably had a lot more meaning for him than for my mom. I think for my mom -- my mom was kind of put in the situation, left the bar and made a decision to go in and learn the business and run it because she didn’t know anything about it. My father died unexpectedly the Saturday before thanksgiving 1995 and my mother started running the bar from January of 1996 and she did that up until 2014. And this is

a lady who didn’t know anything about that industry, about that type of business…

BD & JLF: Wow. YG: And actually, I’d say she got in there and made it more successful than my dad and cleaned it up too. Here’s the thing my mom had and my dad didn’t have. My mom used to work in the school system and she worked in the community’s school so all of the neighborhood kids knew her. So any of the inappropriate things they would have felt a little bit more comfortable doing in front of my dad, they wouldn’t do those things in front of my mom. My mom was like their mom. My mother was pretty hip and was pretty on top of things and she told them that they’re not going to bring their trash into her business, and they did not. She wasn’t afraid. She did that for a long time. My mother was 71 years old when she stopped running the bar. My dad was more so a street person. What I mean by that, a street person with integrity and loyalty was everything; he was a really good person. If he saw you trying to help yourself, he would try to help you. Here’s one of the less than pleasant things we found when he passed away: He had a black book of all of these people that owed him money. I know he probably think we don’t know about it, but we know about it. He was that type of person. He was from the North End he grew up right across from I-75 and Chrysler there on the other side before factories and things were over there. Those were houses over there. My grandmother and grandfather lived across the bridge, and so the North End is where both my mother and father grew up.

JLF: How did he try to help?

YG: So he knew what it was like to grow up in this neighborhood and once he “made-it” he would try to help those in the neighborhood he thought could use a break.

JLF: When your family bought the building, there was no questioning in the neighborhood, like this is just natural and people in the neighborhood had their own businesses.

YG: Right, and everybody knew everybody. And here’s the thing, I’m going to tell you about, this is something. We grew up in that neighborhood, that church that sits right down on the corner of Melbourne. Actually that’s where I’m just coming from because one of the ladies who we grew up with, 91 years old, they just had her home going service today. But that church right there, that’s where I got married, that’s where my mother was a member. My

father knew the bible and he knew the word. My father didn’t go to church. but he was respectable in that community because the pastor, who knew my father since he was younger, would always stop by and say hello and sit down and talk to my dad. So yes, everybody in the community knew my father and knew that we owned the bar. It was well received.

JLF: Do you think there are places today like the Phelps Lounge, neighborhoods where are of the businesses make up the collective vibe of the urban fabric?

neighborhood, it was an impoverished community. At one point in time, it was close to what they call “black bottom”, okay. I felt it was more about you being a business owner who was able to assist and help your own people in your community. My father is a great example. People who did not have money to do certain things but he had the money so he said, “Here you go”. I think we saw a lot of that at the stores. If you were a neighbor and needed a loaf of bread, I’m not going to tell you that you can’t have a loaf of bread or if you needed a package of lunch meat or whatever to feed her kids because we were all in this together.

BD: How was the North End for you growing up?

YG: I do no think there are businesses today like the Phelp’s Lounge. We are all one community.

YG: It probably was different for me than a lot of people. I’m guess what I’ll tell you is; although we grew up poor, I didn’t know that. If you could imagine that, I didn’t know that. I know that people have problems and they argue and all that, I never saw my mother and father do that. My mother and father didn’t do that, they didn’t argue in front of us. And if there were money problems or issues or things like that, they didn’t expose us kids to that. We didn’t know. I’m sure there may have been times when money was tight and maybe they didn’t have different things, but it never made it to our level.

BD: How many businesses do you remember in ’81 being black owned? Or whatever that means. What was the mix of business owners that you recall?

YG: I know all the bars were. All the party stores were I would probably say 75% black owners, maybe a little more. I’m just thinking, all the places I’m telling you about, the store over there, our neighbor’s store, Ms. Laura down the street, Red’s Shoe Shine, Laundromat service with the store, all of those were black owned businesses. All of those.

BD: As far as the business community, your parents owning a bar, so that gives you opportunity to know everybody else who owns stuff? How tight knit was the actual business owning community?

YG: Well here’s what I’ll tell you, back then it probably was very tight because everybody knew everybody and people who owned businesses in the community lived in the community and were a part of the community. Everybody knew everybody. Like the gentleman who owned the store on the corner of Mount Vernon and Oakland, he was our neighbor; he lived five doors down from us.

I’ll be honest, I told my mother when I got married, when things weren’t going so well with my marriage, I told my mother that I really appreciated the way that she raised me. But I felt somewhat dysfunctional as an adult because a lot of the things that people go through or went through, I didn’t go through. I had a wonderful childhood. And I made sure that I let my mother know that before she passed on. I had a tremendous childhood. I don’t remember a bunch of heartaches.

JLF: Was there any interest in the music industry to start to buy some of the buildings or venues? Or was it part of the neighborhood and even if an amazing musician played there or lived in the neighborhood, it was never a point of interest for investors outside of Detroit?

I’ll give you an example, something as small as I love candy and stuff like that. When we were younger my mother wouldn’t let us eat candy. Our candy was a fruit bowl. If you wanted something sweet, we always had grapes and watermelon and whatever the fruit of the season was. We ate that, and she always made sure that we had balanced meals so we weren’t always running to McDonalds or running to the store to get sweet food and all that kind of stuff. Everything was really wholesome because my mother was really, really smart.

YG: I mean you guys got to see that even though there were black businesses there. A lot of the community was an impoverished

My mother dropped out of Cast Tech when she was a senior because she got pregnant. She didn’t have her mother in her life,

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My mother was a good mom. She made sure that we had everything and when it came to her money, she was very good at saving it. She’s one of the reasons why my father was able to grow the business. My mother was really, really smart and held things together.

BD: See that’s funny, that story touches me because my parents, my father had a medical supply business on 6 Mile for 26 years and he just retired out of it like 3 years ago. And my mom was the one who would do so much for the business on the actual administrative, money side. It’s this unique thing about black women who get in business to support their husband’s and the role they end up playing. So I feel you 100%.... You said impoverished when speaking about the neighborhood. The North End definitely has that characteristic today. How did the community feel though? I know there were more people in houses back then. As far as the look of the community, how did it look back then because majority of the people were still in the situation the majority of people are in today. They had jobs though still.

JLF: Was there ever a discussion in the family about the morality of running a bar?

YG: Here’s what I’ll tell you, which is very different from how things are now. Back then, you were a kid and you were expected to stay in a kids place. That was considered grown folks business.

Am I telling the truth?

BD: Yes, you’re telling the truth.

YG: Yes, they had jobs. Back then people had a sense of community, a sense of togetherness, a sense of unity. It was all about trying to keep us together as a unit. The thing about it is, I think people took pride in what they had. If I only had two or three pair of pants, then I made sure I took the best care of those two pair of pants that I had so I was always presentable at all times. We were mannerable. We had morals and it didn’t matter that we didn’t have a lot of money. I’ll be honest with you, when I first realized I didn’t have a lot of money is when I got into Renaissance High School. I graduated from Renaissance High School and so at that time I was going way across town to go to this creme de la creme school and a lot of those people’s children had money. Their moms and fathers were doctors and lawyers and things, and they had money. I was there because I was smart. I didn’t have money, and that’s when I realized I didn’t have money. But you know what, that didn’t really matter because we had love in our house. It didn’t matter. My mom raised us to be well rounded, to have a little bit of everything. You don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket. You want to be able to taste a little bit of everything in life. That’s how my mom raised us. Not having money was okay. We turned out fine.

YG: They wouldn’t have that kind of discussion with us. If they were having that conversation, we would go outside or we’d go play with our toys. As a matter of fact I have to tell you this, I know it’s very, very different in a Caucasian environment and maybe it’s becoming different now because I think we are trying to come to terms with it a little better. Up until recently in the black community, we didn’t even want to talk about death.

We just let it happen and deal with the travesty as it happens.

That’s just what we did. Now I think the conversation is being had. Where as before it’s like somebody died, you don’t know if they had a life insurance policy or anything because nobody talked about that. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with a conversation that involved death. But the reality of it is, we were doing ourselves a disservice by not having that conversation because you needed to know: if there anything in place or what it is you needed to do.

BD: Was it ever a thing for you and your friends to be like, “Yo, something is happening at the Phelps, let’s sneak around the Phelps”?

YG: No, we were too young. I just remember the bright lights and the people’s names. So you knew something was going on at the Phelps or somebody famous was coming because their name was in lights. Sometimes you could see the buses out front and you knew something was going to happen at the Phelps. It would say for example, Jonny Walker coming February... That’s how you would know that somebody was coming. They would be blinking because it was trying to get everyone’s attention. I do remember that.

JLF: Do you plan an instrument?

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YG: I used to.

JLF: What does the Apex Bar mean to you today?

BD: What did you play?

YG: It’s a legacy of ownership. For me, it’s about ownership, perseverance and determination, because I watched my mother and father do it. Good music, which is one of the reasons why I go back and forth deciding whether I want to keep it or let it go.

I watched my mother and father do some good things in there, and they turned somethings around. I watched my mother mentor to some people in there. My mother kept a Holy Bible at that bar.

When you walked in, both entrances of the bar had a bible over the entrances. For me, as far as music goes, I had a lot of good times there, kind of watching some of the neighborhood people transform. We had one gentleman who would transform into James Brown and give us a little show. We had this lady there, her name was Sweet Lucy, and she thought she was Josephine Baker or somebody. They would just come in; there wasn’t anythingspecific going on. We were maybe sitting in there and an event would be going on. Out of the blue, a show would go on because he was James Brown, and she was Josephine Baker. That was pretty fun.

YG: The trumpet and clarinet.

BD: Nice... Back in your day, did a lot of your friends say, “Yo, I want to be an entertainer, I want to be a musician,” was that a big conversation amongst yours. For our generation, that became a heavy conversation. Everybody wanted to become an artist or a musician all of a sudden.

YG: Okay Bryce, now you asked to tell a little something about me. I didn’t have a lot of friends because I wasn’t very approachable back then. I didn’t have a lot friend and I didn’t talk to a lot people. I was always studious, did my homework and did what I was supposed to do. I had an attitude problem and I only talked to people if I needed something from someone or if they had information. Otherwise, back then, I wouldn’t be sitting at a table talking to you two. That was just my M.O. back then. But you know what, I guess I can say this: I just left one of my good friend’s mom’s house, who lives across the street from my mother still, and her son is going to be 60 years old and he’s always been inspired by the music. He still lives on the North End with his mom, but he’s always been into the music. He plays the bass and still goes to band practice and all of that. I guess I would say, somewhere he got inspired by the music because he’s always done it with a couple of other guys in the neighborhood.

I don’t particularly remember that being part of my era. I remember him though. As a matter of fact, he still has his bass sitting there right now. He said he is going to play always.

BD: Were you proud of the North End back then?

Yolanda: Then?! I still am!

BD: I meant it this way. When I was in high school, it was a big east side, west side thing. Was there that kind of identification within the neighborhood back then?

YG: Absolutely, it still is. And here’s what I’ll tell you what I found out. Often times when I meet people for the first time, they have some sort of connection to the North End. They do.

BD: Does it mean anything to you personally how many people in Detroit, or at least two people in Detroit, and a lot of people in the world have a value for the Apex?

YG: Oh, that means everything because here’s the thing. Even when I’m thinking about selling it, I want the new owner to be one that is going to give something back to the community. Say for instance somebody buys it, and wants it to be a bar. I still want it to be run decently and in order because that’s how my mother ran her ship. I don’t want to just sell it to somebody and then a year later... it’s run down. I want them to sustain it, and I want it to be lucrative for them. I still want to be able to come in here and maybe have a drink and remember the good times that we had. So that I can say: “You know my mother and father are part of this legacy here.” So it’s important, I didn’t want to sell it to just anybody, because I could have sold it a long time ago.

JLF: We look at different spaces that we believe to be very important for music history of the city, like the United Recording Studio and they are struggling to keep the studio running. They are being threatened by the Highway Department to be broken down... We look at all these buildings and there are disappearing slowly. There is a risk that there going to be very little trace of

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any African American music history left in the city. We are trying to figure how we can help and work so these places will still be there in 20 years, 30 years... When you say the Apex needs to have a respectful history....

YG: Somebody’s got to take it and do something good with it. It’s in good shape and I just want somebody that cares about it.

BD: What has it been like, personal impact wise, to keep it open for even folks like us to come along a be able to have a have a community conversation or community programming at some point?

YG: It’s been refreshing. It’s been nice. Actually when I let you guys’ use the place, I didn’t tell anybody. I didn’t tell any of my family or anything but some people from the community came, took pictures and put them on Facebook. My family comes like “So you’ve been up there and didn’t tell us?” I kind of explained what I was doing. I did that on purpose. I needed to see if you could draw a crowd. Here’s what I’ll say, in order for it to be a sustainable business and remain a bar you need to have a following. You need people to come to the establishment. We used to be able to get it from the community.

BD: So maybe our last question on the interview side. Knowing from your own life that Oakland Avenue used to be popping and this music economy supported all other sorts of businesses in a direct way. If we can use music economy once again to get Oakland Avenue popping…

YG: That would be great.

BD: What would be your dream for what that might look like?

YG: For me, I would just like it to be an area where people could come together, have a good time and be safe. That’s what I want it to look like. I don’t think there are a lot of places now where you can get that kind of feeling... It would be beautiful to see Oakland Avenue come back. I think that it would rejuvenate the neighborhood. There has to be something there to draw the people there and right now there is nothing. There has to be something in the neighborhood to draw you together and music can very well be it. I don’t think people don’t come because they don’t care; there is nothing for them to come to.

I will tell you this though, a lot of the people of the neighborhood are older people. Their children and grandchildren have moved on. I look at the block my mom lived on, my nephew lives there now there now. They lost a sense of ownership.There are only 5 of the original homeowners and they are older people. The other people are just renters. To me, that makes a difference. There is a difference between renting and buying property. When you’re renting, the people don’t really care. When you’re buying, you’re investing into the community. But who knows, the music is what might rejuvenate that area. It needs something. It needs love.

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WHAT’S WRONG WITH? A CONVERSATION BETWEEN JAFFER KOLB + SAMBA JONES images SAMBA JONES Oft-mistaken for a carte blanche testbed for innovative practice in the wake of much mediatized economic collapse, Detroit attracts more than its share of participatory experiments. As neighborhoods come together to problem-solve what to do with vast tracts of land, crumbling infrastructure, and cultural autonomy, architects and planners have looked for ways to work in dialogue with residents to find new spaces and spatial conditions to combat the city’s decline.

I. What’s wrong with murals?

Yet the proliferation of such tactics have drawn equal measures of criticism: allegations of parachute aid; cultural insensitivity, and bad social politicking all seemingly unavoidable. Such critiques have reached fever pitch, with “bottom-up” urbanism nearly as toxic as “top-down” razing was at its apogee. A “winwin” solution where architecture’s disciplinary methods intersect with social need appears not just distant, but impossible, and the climate increasingly encourages the tacit acceptance of universal loss.

JK: Perhaps the better way to understand the problem is not by criticizing the mural as a form, but to consider what murals represent in this very particular context. What was once considered a kind of democratic medium—a literal inscription of an environment—has become an instrument; a metonym for participatory aesthetics.

SJ: To begin, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with murals.

Depending on taste, there are “good” murals and “bad” murals, graphically precocious murals, classically kitschy murals. In Detroit, like in so many economically strained urban scenarios, you encounter an over-abundance of un-ironically optimistic versions. They’re everywhere.

This scenario produces a nebulous aura of apology around working in Detroit as many designers become increasingly selfaware of issues around gentrification, race relations, and cultural appropriation. The condition has become endemic to questions around working in Detroit: designers are on the defensive, asking (themselves and each other) not how can we help but rather what’s wrong with helping? In the spirit of these tragic rhetorics, a conversation between Samba Jone, Detroit-based designer, and Jaffer Kolb, New York designer and Detroit tourist, both of whom are trying to navigate methods for a critical design practice in the midst of the city’s arrangement and litany of small-scale design projects...

SJ: Yes, in some ways they now serve as signifiers and philanthropic mechanisms to allocate small scale funding packages to organizations and individuals in order to beautify economically insolvent scenarios. But while we can talk about what they represent, we can still frame the problem as one about aesthetics: in many cases, murals no longer represent the community as much as the aspiration or ethos of a giving institution.

JK: Aesthetics, here seems like a slippery topic. The aesthetics might be institutionally managed, but aren’t they community driven. Their authors are still oftentimes residents. That said, is there a signature “Detroit” style we can find in these projects that would indicate a denial of the hand of the individual or collective?

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SJ: There’s no formal anthology that I can think of, but there are some recurring themes and visual tropes: the narrativedriven “graphic novel” approach, the Diego Rivera Heroicist model, the Monument to Paint, Sci-Fi Romanticism, MegaScale Memphis Style, Neo-Postwar Optimism, Urban Graphics Hallmark Greeting Card, Trompe l’oeil, not to mention the most prevalent variation - the Community Mosaic. Detroit’s murals, in their sincerity, aesthetic guilelessness, and narrative charge, seem virtually impervious to a certain kind of criticism related to expertise. In many ways, these projects stand in for the specificity of place and community, so a discussion of formal virtuosity gives the impression of frivolousness or fussiness. But as ubiquitous signifiers with the feel good missive that things are getting better, murals tend to mask infrastructural and material degradation that are still rather daunting.

JK: Murals, whether as aesthetic or form, are bound by their surface: they mask whatever lies behind, which in this case is oftentimes collapsing structure and degraded interiors. It seems like this is an issue of camouflage—or maybe even duplicity where surfaces overtake spaces as design’s principal onus.

SJ: What’s more perplexing about the mural is that it’s become an instrumentalized urban marker; a demonstrative strategy that suggests people can collectively pull themselves out of the muck, that is if they work hard enough. In the face of extreme need, those mostly well-intentioned efforts oftentimes cloak economically insolvent urban scenarios as they promote a seemingly innocuous, makeshift, and anti-authorial aesthetic regime.

II. What’s wrong with beautification?

SJ: Observing Detroit’s outlying neighborhoods over the last few years, I get the sense that residents appreciate small-scale beautification projects because they represent investment and jobs, especially for those eligible to pursue such contracts.

Ostensibly, that’s very reassuring. It’s a consolation to think that things can be salvaged, that people care, that a neighborhood’s projective sensibility can find expression.

JK: But that expression is complicated. Capitalism has historically used aesthetics to hide its operations. In this case it seems particularly menacing as it apparently gives more agency

to the human subject (ie community) as a method of masking its interests and its intentions. That seems to be the greatest danger of beautification: like the mural, it has to do with surface over system, and also falls under rhetorics of “safety” (ie whitewashing blighted areas to make them appear problem-free). Though this is not to say that communities shouldn’t have nice things, bringing us back to the problem of aesthetics. What does beautification look like?

SJ: Given the context, philanthropic interests reluctant to get involved in ‘taste’ culture are obliged to side with the visual indiscernibility of social practice. So art, in the guise of low fi tectonics, fragmentation, DIY gestalt, and other tendencies related to an aesthetic of deskilling, is being tasked with pacifying some very real anxieties while it pretends not to have an aesthetic agenda at all. Maybe a way around this problem in social practice is to self-consciously embrace constructed aesthetics; to recognize that the way things look does matter.

Clearly, the binary opposition between the social and the aesthetic is a bit debilitating.

JK: There’s also a strange condescension in the argument that certain modes of beauty are inaccessible to certain audiences.

Instead of constantly trying to embrace a suitable image of “democracy” as an apparent aesthetic or obscuring the visual aspects of practice, we might create a hybrid of technical skill and graphic figuration that translates images, patterns, textures, colors, and forms into culturally recognizable yet perceptually renewed idioms. TJK: Right, in this case the style is a funny mashup of 1970s funk album art, car culture, and textile patterning.

Instead of defaulting to deskilling, or handing over a blank surface for street artists, you are putting something out there that looks like something. And it doesn’t look alienating—like a sterile white box—or out of context. It looks like it belongs, perhaps paradoxically given that it’s a spaceship, but certainly not anyone can make it.

III. What’s wrong with rogue?

SJ: If by ‘rogue’ we mean cultural activity that is not institutionally sanctioned, then going rogue seems to be a real thorn in the current redevelopment plan. While murals, for example, belong to an authorized approach to beautification, illegal forms of the same pursuit may be criminalized or covered up ad hoc.

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There is, you might know, a city-dispensed beige paint.

Apparently it’s available in a few different neutral shades. And it gets applied to the surfaces of buildings without anyone’s concent. The paint job is intented to unify, neutralize, and spruce up the built environment. In the process, a great amount of history, patina, and narrative gets obscured, contributing to the evolving and deeply problematic depiction of the city as tabula rasa.

V. What’s wrong with short and quick?

SJ: It’s a truism that contemporaneity is about speeding things up: having quick ideas, getting rapid responses, and experiencing immediate gratifications. Philanthropic institutions want a quick fix, too. They typically ask for 18-month framework: a summer/ early fall launch, fall/winter for development, spring/summer for big, bold events, and a few months to clean up the confetti.

The expectation, of course, is that measurable impact can be created and assessed within that apportioned span, so that we can safely shift our attention to the next cycle of funding.

JK: This narrative seems to be steeped in its own repetitions; bound by its cycles. By repeating a scale of time it seems like there may be a repetition in certain scales of work; and even in certain aesthetics. It also suggests that working through longer or more complex issues might be challenging, if not impossible.

What do you do if you want to work on something slower?

SJ: Operating in Detroit’s very idiosyncratic scenario, we often have to weigh the risks of crafting fundable ‘short and quick’ proposals that may require additional competitive grants to come to fruition, verses outing our protracted plans and not securing funding at all. We tend to side with immediacy, ephemerality, imagining that these short-term projects will serve as catalysts for future investment. And we enjoy the brisk exhilaration of it all.

JK: So in that case it might be best just to accept the rhythms of funding cycles while pursuing longer projects—using one to bolster the other. In a way, it’s actually quite nice to allow architecture to work simultaneously across multiple time-lines, with synchronizations between short, fast, and light projects that sometimes align with longer term strategies. That said, it seems like there is no way to insure that future development will line up with your initial intentions or those of your constituency.

SJ: None at all. As a consequence, we see some sociallyminded urban projects just terminate, or start to collect dust. In other cases, some grass roots organizations piggyback on the successes of design initiatives, and integrate the work into their own projects. And ultimately, the most worrying aspect of these short-term design interventions is that they lay the groundwork for future private investment. Observing the work of the ONE Mile project, for example, we’ve witnessed private developers bid on properties that were rehabbed for public programming, and this is within an urban scenario where speculation would have been inconceivable a few years back.

VI. What’s wrong with trying?

JK: The thing that’s so frustrating with Detroit, and with this notion of participation, is a known paradox: is it better not to act or to act in a way that might be construed as irresponsible?

This is what I like about the discussion we are having today. You point out that we need to claim more design intentionality and even authorship. This seems exactly right. Not that we embrace architectural ego, but that we assert the value of our own skill and labor in designing, constructing and producing space. That work then enters the public realm in ways that are unpredictable and impossible to foresee. It becomes the property of the collective insofar as the collective authors its use and value as a community object, but not its material presence. In a way, it’s worth trying so long as we know the instruments we’re trying with and the limits of our expertise instead of using architecture to predict, comment upon, or seek to organize social and civic behavior.

SJ: Given the precariousness and dynamism of Detroit’s urban and social situation, a purely speculative or representation retreat seems like a missed opportunity. So we need to buck up and accept the limitations of architecture’s cultural prowess without too much lament. At the same time, I see what we do as a material and discursive part of a broader and rather messy network of urban activity, where the things we make aren’t the end at all, but provocations for much more robust and contingent participatory practices.

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The ONE Mile garage beautified with beige city paint. Left: before.

MY PORTION OF TERRITORY words & artwork Carl Wilson

I don’t want to come off sounding like a snob-ass intellectual.

That I’m sure was a wasted phrase because I have never been accused of being an intellectual. If you know me you know I am an angry populist, a believer in the proletariat, and all things common, borderline, and lowbrow.

Into my life walks Erin Falker. Stanford educated, MFA, proclaiming she wants to get her doctorate soon or she may die.

Erin was turned down for a role in The Cosby Show reboot. Some say it was because she was too brown skinned, but I know it was mostly because of Bill’s legal problems and the peculiar notion that America is not keen on a TV show with a rapist in the role of the best dad ever, go figure, but I digress.

About three years ago Erin and I were both contributing to a local art institution that shall remain nameless. I was contributing. She was making a real difference there. I was thunderstruck by Erin’s vast knowledge of art and history. The kid was born to curate. She put together the best exhibitions the place had ever seen. We decided to work together outside of that joint. We decided we would create our own institution/world where we would know no boundaries. Silly rabbits.

We didn’t fit in Midtown (I didn’t go to CCS or WSU), We didn’t fit Downtown (poor credit ratings), We didn’t fit on the Grand River Creative Corridor (too many geniuses there already), and Hamtramck was definitely out (We reject hipsters with an almost religious zeal).

Erin and I really didn’t fit anywhere. The original odd couple working together, grandfather and granddaughter. In the end we created The Enclave Project for Contemporary Art. I wanted to bring the work of uneducated, diverse, and rebellious figurative artists to the spotlight, and Erin wanted to educate the masses so they would know how to properly rebel. At least, that’s the way I see it. Ask me next week and my vision may have cleared. Ask her and she will compose a thesis and get back to you.

In Detroit when you talk about the arts and communities almost inevitably the conversation is about one of a few places. Art in Detroit seems to be concentrated into discrete districts whose boundaries are fixed. Part of the reason this is so is because artists are like molecules—we gravitate towards one another and when conditions are favorable we stick together.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. We are all seeking the place that’s right for us. No one way of creating is better or correct.

Fortunately, we met some great people who believed in what we were doing and they found a small spot for us in the North End. A diverse group representing the complex fabric of metropolitan Detroit—Jerry Hebron, Oakland Avenue Urban Farms, Jean Louis Farges, Anya Sirota, and Halima Cassels welcomed us with open arms. Ann Reemsten- Ritchie backs up everything we do. Thank you one and all.

We work now to cultivate our small portion of territory. Erin is concentrating on the Wee Art School, and outdoor lecture series featuring artists, critics, creatives, and historians. I am pouring my heart and soul into the launch of CAMP, Community Art Makers Project, a mentoring program featuring a small group of artists sharing and building fundamental art skills in the kids and adults of the North End neighborhood.

Detroit is much larger than Midtown and Downtown. I don’t really care about hockey stadiums, five star restaurants, and million dollar art galleries with their lily white clientele that too many of us can’t afford to go to. Yeah, those places are pretty, and they’re filled with pretty people in stylish clothes spending lots of money.

That looks good in brochures, but real Detroit, the Detroit that survived when things were at their worst is also found right here, in places like the North End. In Detroit’s interior neighborhoods and communities. That my friend is my portion of territory.

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Waiting for Change to Come, printworks

Burn, printworks

Geothe, printworks

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Mom Always Liked You Best, printwork

WILD THINGS words Lorena Figueiredo images Hubert Watkins

turned into an enhanced way to see, because it allows one to remember. It renders things visible. It turns occasional sights into memories. It is also a work of mourning, about what we lose as we age and what we lose when we ignore what surrounds us, when we refuse to acknowledge movement besides our own.

“I like things that are there for you to see but you never see them,” says 75-year-old Hubert Watkins, while sitting on the front porch of his house on Smith St., just across Dolores Bennett Park in Detroit’s North End. From his couch (an old bus seat), he observes, day after day, kids playing basketball, young men listening to rap music, trees changing leaves. But what interests him most are the things that most people do not pay attention to, the lives whose presence may easily remain unacknowledged: squirrels and rabbits running around, pheasants taking a relaxing stroll, seagulls overseeing the park, birds nesting, a peregrine falcon making an appearance. He also admires tiny yellow and pink flowers blossoming on the curbs or weeds that no one seems to control which render life – at least his life – more interesting and rich.

Hubert registers their presence, not only by looking and remembering, but also by taking photos. After more than 20 years of this activity, he has a collection of thousands of pictures.

At the beginning, in the 1990s, it was less systematic. Back then, he had just retired from his job, due to a repetitive strain injury. “I worked for Ford, assembly line. As far as anybody is concerned, that’s all I’ve ever done.” He then moved back to the house on Smith St., where he was born, to take care of his elderly parents. Being already interested in photography for decades, he then started documenting life in the neighborhood: people, houses, animals, plants. Around 5 years ago, Hubert started losing his eyesight, and that was when his routine evolved into a methodical photography project. Documenting became more urgent than ever, and from then on he would always be sitting outside with a camera by his side. Photography as a medium

Only recently wild animals became a more regular presence in the North End, or, as Hubert puts it, the wild animals “have migrated into the city.” Growing up there 60 years ago, he recalls how dense the neighborhood was: “all these empty spaces were houses,” and there were “neighborhood stores that you could walk to... Not anymore.” Today, according to conservative estimates of 2014 by Motor City Mapping, at least 20% of all properties in the North End are very likely to be vacant. Land vacancy is not by any means a “natural” phenomenon in innercity Detroit. Rather, it is a consequence of a multi-layered process of decline, caused by what has been broadly termed ‘white flight’, racial segregation, the deindustrialization crisis, concentration of poverty and fiscal distress.

Many of the neighborhood’s abundent “vacant” lots are not regularly mowed and are not designated and maintained as green spaces by city planning. Due to the city’s diminished ability to provide such public services, and for reasons not simply associated with the resurgence of the “natural,” much of the “vacant” land evolves into prairie-like landscapes, with tall grass, weeds and broad variety of native plants. This vegetation gives rise to the presence of animals such as pheasants and rabbits, which in turn attract falcons and hawks. To Hubert, this is all new. Even though there were green spaces in the neighborhood

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The North End today is inhabited not only by humans, but also by the people of the pheasants, diplomats of the rabbits, possum pioneers, exiled members of the falcons, insistent woodpeckers, the sovereign nation of bees, the colonizers of dandelion, the diaspora of mulberry trees, and many others. A neighborhood with so many life species coexisting and interacting cannot be simply called “vacant”: it looks more like a parliament of things, as the philosopher Bruno Latour would say.

back then, they were tamed landscapes, like backyard vegetable gardens or well-kept front yards. He recalls that his father planted a garden and raised chickens in their backyard. Still, to see pheasants at that time, one would have to go to northern Michigan’s countryside. “Now they’re right here and nobody pays any attention to it.”

Hubert may very well be the sole wildlife photographer who neither goes on complicated expedition trips nor rides a 4x4 truck in the woods. Staying in the same place is almost a value statement: “You don’t have to go any further than your front porch.” And he is not specifically talking about his front porch.

He is referring to almost anywhere in the North End, as long as you sit there for long enough and are willing to see.

Hubert’s stoop is, according to the wildlife observer, not even the most prolific spot to observe animals, mainly due to the human and automobile activity in and around Dolores Bennett Park. Rabbits and pheasants also stay clear because the lawn is regularly mowed in the park, limiting space for animals to hide, lay eggs or give birth. In contrast, just one block down on Smith St., between Brush and John R., where not one single house remains on the north side of the street, an informal green space has emerged -- so populated with pheasants that one of the neighbors calls it “Pheasant Park.” She enjoys observing them while sipping tea in her front porch. Down one block, on Bethune St., a couple of residents have also reported seeing pheasants, rabbits and possums on a regular basis. Up north at the Oakland Avenue Urban Farm, pheasants munch on kale and eat peas (that they learned how to shell), not without being observed by some menacing hawks – and a very exasperated farm manager.

Contrary to what the “ruin porn” narratives would like us to believe, the North End is not an “empty,” “dead” or “ghost” area.

It is a lively and rich neighborhood, in which humans cohabit with other species, and the built environment lies side by side with less-tamed landscapes. It is an assemblage that challenges the traditional divides between what is usually seen as “natural” or “rural” on one side and “urban” on the other side. The boundaries become blurred: it does not make sense to claim that the North End is not “urban” anymore only because it has wildlife. At the same time, it does not make sense to argue that it is a purely man-made industrial landscape, because such a thing does not exist. Is it a “rururban” space? Or is it a post-industrial, neo-rural, new urban landscape? The terms might not be too important.

What matters here is that the North End is alive. And the only way to assure that it is truly alive, that it remains vibrant, is by looking at all these species, all these socio-naturally constructed spaces, and by taking pictures of them, talking about them, talking to them, everyday, until it makes sense to be together, until we can compose this rich parliament of things. Until everyone else is able to do what Hubert says: “Just open your eyes.”

While Hubert might unique in his photographic front porch pursuits, so many of the North End’s residents observe and interact with the emergent flora and fauna. These interactions allow different species to coexist, which may ultimately correspond to a multispecies entanglement, where human life is not the only one to be accounted for.

Lorena is a student of urban sociology at Sciences Po, Paris. She can be reached at lorena.figueiredo@sciencespo.fr

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JAZZ ARCHEOLOGY words Dr. Carleton Gholz images Jean Louis Farges

On International Jazz Day, April 30th, a group of jazz archaeologists from the Detroit Sound Conservancy (DSC) and Detroit Afrikan Music Institution (DAMI), celebrated and salvaged the Blue Bird Inn’s modest but hallowed stage.

The time had come. The current owner, like many Detroiters, unable to accumulate the capital to launch the West Side property into a new business, had given the DSC permission to survey, document, and salvage interior elements of the former jazz club. The initial survey occurred last spring but with the roof finally caving in the time to finish the job had arrived.

Thanks to DAMI, the DSC was able to couple imagination with sweat equity to remove the stage and its multicolored backdrop, so that some day others will be able to stand with Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Yusef Lateef…. It is now in a safe storage unit ready to be activated.

It would be folly to think that any one organization could or should preserve all of Detroit music history. We must pool our ideas and our strength, inspire one another across our cultural preservation ecosystem, and build legitimacy for sonic values within Detroit’s resurgence together.

On removal of the stage, the DSC immediately wrote a grant proposal to renovate the stage as a mobile museum and programming platform. We continue to engage the owner on the future of the building. You can read more on the DSC website.

archeological team: Carleton Ghotz, Eric Howard, Bryce Detroit, Jean Louis Farges, Lorin Brace learn more about Detroit music preservation efforts at: detroitsoundconservancy.org

WELCOME TO DETROIT, BIRTHPLACE OF THE NEW ECONOMY words Paul Chandler

Capitalism is failing people and the planet. However, its failures are not yet pervasive enough to force humanity to develop a better alternative. Not yet.

Detroit cannot wait idly for this to come to pass. Here, the old economy has failed so badly and the need for survival is so great that Detroiters must do for themselves and must do so differently. At the same time, should transformative efforts succeed, we could serve as a model for the world’s next system.

Therefore, Detroit is not only the canary in the coalmine.

Detroit is the great hope of humanity.

The number and variety of Detroiters’ visionary initiatives are vast. They include: community gardens, urban farms, sovereign food systems, member-owned cooperatives, buying clubs, social enterprises, community production facilities, new work enterprises, community land trusts, community supported agriculture, renewable energy solutions, community-owned power, fabrication labs, off-the-grid homes, gift swaps, timeshares, freedom schools, co-working spaces, independent media, artist collectives, cooperative entertainment infrastructures, experimental music venues, new genre explorations, and intentional cultural programming that uplifts positive and indigenous identities.

These efforts share a common goal: collective economic determination and social liberation through a genuine culture of cooperation, community, democracy, and solidarity. Scaled up, these core elements could form the basis of a new cultural and economic paradigm—the solidarity economy.

Paul Chandler, a recent graduate of Columbia Law School, is the Lowenstein Law Fellow at C2BE, providing technical legal assistance and community education while facilitating collaboration within Detroit’s cooperative ecosystem. In his free time, Paul writes and raps.

Yet if the solidarity economy is a better alternative than unbridled capitalism, how can it actually replace it?

The first step must be to establish the viability of the solidarity economy. Detroiters are already doing this at the project level with unparalleled resourcefulness, creativity, and vision.

Additional resources and training must be provided to ensure the continued success of each initiative.

The second step must be to scale, and to scale in a way that is strategic; to coordinate the many successful projects so that they prefigure the next system and convert the old one; to transform a city that symbolizes the impending failures of the old system into a liberatory beacon of the new. In short, to build Detroit’s solidarity economy.

Detroit need not only be ground zero of the failing old economy. Detroit can be the birthplace of the new economy.

In fact, it must be. For if it can be done in Detroit, it can be done anywhere. And that is the ultimate goal. To envision a better world and build it out of the ruins of the old. Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus. What’s more Detroit than that?

Interested in the new economy? Attend the Detroit Cooperative Community, a monthly gathering meant to nurture the cooperative consciousness and commitments needed for a solidarity economy. It takes place the last Wednesday of each month at the D. Blair Theater of the Cass Corridor Commons, 4605 Cass Ave. Visit c2be.org to learn more.

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DOCUMENTING DETROIT Participants in 2016 Ideas City, an artists’ collective travels from Bogata to Detroit and documents the people they meet on the way.

Ideas City came to town at the end of April. Organized by New York’s New Museum, the weeklong event cum nomadic think tank was staged at the Herman Kiefer Complex, a once city-owned public health facility recently purchased by New York developer, architect, and Ideas City partner Ron Castellano. Over the span of one week, participants in the initiative’s competitive residency program animated this future site of redevelopment with conversations and workshops addressing Detroit’s most pressing urban issues: affordable housing, historic preservation, urban mobility, land stewardship, and of course, gentrification.

Ideas City organizers strategically established working teams comprised of people who could roughly be grouped as belonging to three key categories: smart Detroiters, US cultural players, and international creative thinkers. Together, tasked with research and deliberation, they produced proposals for urban action. Site visits, lectures, and conversations with storied local residents, policy makers, activists, and others, complimented the workshops. The week culminated in a public conference, featuring a range of expert speakers and Ideas City participants ready to share their new insights into what shapes the city.

For some international contributors, the week of formal activity was just a primer, enticing a prolonged stay and the exploration of the city at an independent pace. The Columbian arts collective, CaldodeCultivo, for one, extended their visit, connecting with local cultural producers and documenting the encounter for an evolving video art project. Their thoughts and snaps are shared here...

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CaldodeCultivo is a trans-disciplinary group of creation and research based in Bogota, Colombia. The work of our artistic collective transits from aesthetical to political strategies to address the city and the urban experience as a contested territory. We see our projects as a possibility for subverting official narratives and imagining new ways of being together.

Our practice focuses on questioning the neoliberal narratives and policies of the contemporary city, through contextualized projects developed closely with local artist and grassroots

organizations. We use diverse artistic languages, from public installations to video, to create devices of counter information and popular agitation with objective of highlight the exclusions and the violence that urban policies imply but also to amplify the struggles, the resistance tactics and strategies of the so-called informal city, this great mass of beings and places that are excluded from the development and are victims of it.

Coming from Colombia we know how it feels to be diminished by stereotypical images and narratives of our land and our people. Although Detroit its full of life, creativity and resilience, terms such as “the greatest bankruptcy” “the ghost city”, “the capital of crime”, “the ruin”, that are used to describe the city are not only ahistorical and biased but also useful to speculators who are seen as saviors of a “hopeless” metropolis while the Detroiters are blamed when not completely erased from the equation. So the people from Detroit are not only fighting the violence of the State and the market but also facing the violence of misrepresentations of the city and its inhabitants. In that context, CaldodeCultivo with a video piece want to respond to such violent representations with the creative “violence” of the spoken word in a broad sense, that is to say that we want to build a powerful imaginary of the city through artists and activist who use the body and the words as political and poetic strategies.

This project is the result of a residency at PoppsPacking, and was possible thanks to the laboratory Ideas-City an experience that let us get to know amazing people and projects, and of course it couldn’t be possible without the collaboration of the artists who participated in it (by Alphabetical order): Billy Mark, Bryce Detroit, Deonte Osayande, Detroit Poetry Society (Gabrielle Knox, Sheezy Boo Beezy, Intellect Allison, DOMiNO LA3, Rocket Man), Hallima Cassells, Malik Yakini, Marsha Music, MavOne, Ray C. Johnson, Sanu , Sol Le, Tawana Petty, and Underground Resistance.

learn more about CaldodeCultivo at caldodecultivo.com

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FREE MARKET GOES GLOBAL words & image Halima Cassells

Born on Detroit’s North End and catalyzed by the ONE Mile project, The Free Market of Detroit is exploding. It’s gone global!

And at a deeper level it is also an act of resistance and cultural reclamation.

We are staying busy: upcycling clothing items, swapping in gardens, at schools, in the park, and across the Atlantic Ocean.

Gift economies have existed for hundreds of thousands of years all around the world. Gift economies work by the principle of the “third corner,” as opposed to a one-to-one transaction. Everyone lives in abundance and everyone shares; when someone fishes, everyone eats. The concepts of personal property and boundaries are much more fluid; the values of community responsibility is uplifted; and things are valued for their use-- not as symbols of status.

In conjunction with Zimbabwe Cultural Centre of Detroit and artists from both Detroit and Zimbabwe, we have created an intercontinental swap. Working with visiting artist, Masibma Hwati- we launched a project called Pimp My Shoe. Creating upcycled shoes with scrap leather, we swapped the repurposed shoes and other Detroit items with folks in Harare, and they returned in kind. A part of a larger cultural exchange with artists and students, ZCCD has helped facilitate 3 exchanges, and we look forward to more.

We know that there are many other folks out there swapping.

There are churches like St. Peter’s and Spirit of Hope and Fort Street Presbyterian that have community closets. There is Detroiters Helping Each Other in SW Detroit, a year-round free store. Some folks have treasure chests in their homes that they bring out at parties... And one-time swaps are popping up all over.

There are many mechanisms for sharing stuff and time. One tradition that has been practiced by the indigenous in North America has been the potlatch - a feast where goods and foods are shared between families, kind of like a church potluck+swap.

This was actually outlawed in Canada by the colonial settler government for 100 years because it was viewed as a threat-the simple notion that the native desire to give away goods was the opposite of the “Christian capitalist” values and threatened commerce, justified criminalizing a culture of swapping and community building. Not only can you find great shoes and books-- but each time you swap you strike against empire and oppression, and build the beloved community.

So you can, too --Next time you get together with family and friends, ask everyone to bring something to give away and set it on a table. Once everyone is there - tell them they can take whatever they like. It’s that simple.

Upcoming Free Market of Detroit Swaps...

08/06/16 Sidewalk Festival of the Arts @ Artist Village Detroit 08/20/16 The 4th Annual Healing Arts Festival @ Oakland Ave. Urban Farm 10/11/16 Plant Swap @ Oakland Ave. Urban Farm 12/03/16 Noel Night Holiday Swap @ Cass Corridor Commons 12/11/16 Holiday Swap & North End SOUP @ St. Matthew’s St. Joseph’s

On one level swapping is fun - people get rid of unwanted stuff, share stories and take home free stuff that they do want.

Swapping is also interrupting capitalism and over-consumption-it keeps useable stuff out of landfills or the incinerator, and keeps money in your pocket.

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proposal for Michigan Arts League, Carr Center

AKOAKI ARCHITECTURAL DESIGNERS

interview Samantha Okolita drawings Akoaki photography Doug Coombe

Jean Louis Farges and Anya Sirota have collaborated creatively for a long stretch. They met in Paris, moved to New York, and even survived a short stint in Boston. But it wasn’t until relocating to Michigan in 2008, that they launched their design studio, Akoaki. Since, they have staged illicit galleries on the roof of the Packard Plant, hosted a 36-hour film festival and public agora, installed op art pavillions in defunct industrial sites, and in partnership with Bryce Detroit and Halima Cassells, launched the ONE Mile Project in Detroit’s storied North End. I sat down with Jean Louis and Anya in their studio office, where the shared work space is, surprise, hot lips pink.

JLF: Yes, optimistic. I mean architecture is a tool for impact.

SO: Gold or pink?

AS: Right, I think it is fair to say that we are not a practice in the traditional sense. The term ‘practice’ suggests that a method can be perfected through endless repetition. We think of the work we do as siding more closely with experimentation. So, we are more of a research office than we are of a practice where we perfect a particular form of making and adjust it to a multitude of possible scenarios. But the question of whether we are more concerned with the social or aesthetic qualities of space making is very important. I think the two always go hand in hand. We produce aesthetically considered work regardless of the complexity, or the economic scarcity, of a particular situation. So while we are always responding to the social realities of place, we are nonetheless committed to experimenting with novel aesthetics to make those situations legible and inclusive.

AS: Both. Gold and pink!

JLF: We love to see the reality of the world in gold and pink.

SO: Would you consider yourselves optimists or a pessimists?

AS: Oh. We are total optimists. Don’t you think? I mean, I‘m privately pessimistic – that’s just my cultural background -- but in the work we do, we’re material utopians. We totally believe that architecture is not just a projective representation of a possible world, but that formulated it transforms our realities, hopefully for the better.

AS: In a sense, we’re not just critical of the things that are happening around us. We want a hand in bringing joy more, share in the pleasures of pop aesthetics, create environments that seem untethered, traverse social barriers, all of that… it’s incredibly optimistic. . .

SO: Are you a social or an aesthetic practice?

JLF: We are not a practice.

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The Mothership, assembly manual previous page: the Mothership site plan

Oakland Avenue Urban Farm, emergent plan

SO: What are some of the challenges that you face as designers in the city of Detroit?

JLF: No, we are not a firm in the traditional sense. We are just individuals, very singular individuals, working in the urban field using design as a political tool for communication.

SO: Since you are not a practice, do you consider your “practice” to be architecture? And if so, how would you define architecture as a role within that?

JLF: If you design a space, you build a space, and you have a program, I believe it is probably called architecture.

AS: No, we side flatly with the idea that we are working within the disciplinary bounds of architecture. We might be pushing those boundaries, or not pursuing traditional, economic or institutional frameworks for the production of architecture. We don’t want to be licensed, for instance, because we don’t need a license for the kind of work we do.

JL: There is no license to do a temporary music scenography.

Maybe you need a license to do a kitchen? When you design and fabricate contemporary object sin the city of Detroit, like the Mothership, you really don’t need a license.

SO: Your website claims that you critically engage the social, spatial and material realities of place. What do you consider the reality of Detroit that you work within?

JLF: The reality of Detroit is that it illustrates a great American failure. There are people, institutions, corporation that are responsible for bringing about this situation, and the outcomes of those historical and continuing actions are a now a collective responsibility. Everyone needs to react to this failure, and not to leave people to fend for themselves and pick up the pieces for other’s mistakes.

JL: As a designer, I think it is very important for me to witness, to learn and to listen to people. It is a challenge. You have to put all assumptions to the side, everything you know, everything you learned and everything you believe is true because you have to confront something that doesn’t exist anywhere else at this scale.

You really have to listen to the people who live in this city.

AS: I think a unique thing about Detroit is that it’s one of the few places I have ever lived and operated that is so brutally expressive about problems of race. I think those issues exist elsewhere, but because of the demographics of the city, there is a way that people talk about those frictions and problems that is spectacularly frontal and transparent, and frankly, constructive.

It is something I have never experienced in other cities, and I am sure that these issues are just as pertinent and pressing in other cities, it’s just that they are left unspoken. And I think one of the challenges in working in Detroit is the baggage that comes with all of the pre-conceptions attached to race, ethnicity, gender, age, history, narrative, euro-centrism, and all of those are superimposed on us as architects. We have the challenge of surpassing those presuppositions, sometimes publically.

SO: So, despite the fact that neither of you are from Detroit, do you consider your work to be authentic Detroit design?

JL: I think it is very positive to be outside of Detroit because it gives an alternate perspective. When I am in Europe, people fascination with and attraction to Detroit is palpable.

Maybe for people living in city, when you’re fully embedded, it might sometimes be difficult to see its unique advantages, idiosyncrasies, cultural possibilities.

AS: I might have to disagree with you. I’m not sure that Detroit is simply evidence of America’s greatest failures.

JL: I know. It’s not the greatest. But it’s one of them. And there are mini late capitalist failures like this everywhere but this one is a big one.

AS: Yes, so it may be a failure, but Detroit is also a dark illustration of capitalism’s exceptional successes, which is that it’s incredibly elastic, it can leave people behind, it can adapt and adjust, and it’s ruthless, and it always succeeds in moving to wherever there are greatest opportunities. So, we are seeing at the tail end of the cycle and the beginning of a new cycle where there is new speculation and new redevelopment and new opportunities for someone. Those opportunities do not appear egalitarian at this time and there are quire a few people excluded from the upward and prospective turns we’re witnessing.

AS: I also think we are from outside of the city. I think we are from outside of every context in which we work. So we are never authentic New York architects, even if we are practicing there. We are never Parisian architects. I think this is an advantage where we have to consistently reconsider and critically reconsider the meaning of particular contextual scenarios, social situations.

We redefine the terms and and learn how to work in novel ways, sensitive to the context but mostly outside of it.

JLF: There are so many opportunities when you have knowledge and access to capital. There are so many opportunities in the city of Detroit. But when you get involves, you start to be part of the transformation of the city from a personal vantage point.

When you buy property even if you believe you are the right person and you have moral feelings, you invariably change the cultural dynamic of the city.

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SO: You seem to be constantly building relationships with the community organizations. How do these relationships affect the way you work?

SO: One can say you are branding the ONE Mile project. So what is the value of creating a recognizable identity for a project like ONE Mile?

AS: We don’t actually create relationships with community organizations. We build relationships with individuals in the community. What we have discovered is that there are a lot of politics involved in community organizations. Those forces can be very complicated and sometimes detrimental to the longevity of a particular neighborhood. We have done better establishing relationships outside of those constructs. What has happened is that it has helped us build and join a very broad network of individuals who are Utopians like us and get to operate in ways that are, until now, unfathomable, that are completely interdisciplinary, that are risky, that can be fast moving and shape shifting.

AS: Well, real estate re-developers do that masterfully. They first brand a place first, a place that might not exist yet, a place that is a virtual projection. Think Soho, Nolita. You start by identifying a virtual boundary and then capital comes. In this case, the ONE Mile project doesn’t necessarily attempt to brand a place so much as the concept of cultural vitality and cultural autonomy in order to bring to the forefront a great many narratives from people already deeply rooted in the place. It a preemptive move to ensure everyone is included in the equitable future of the neighborhood.

SO: Okay. What is the role of community participation in your design, or is there one?

SO: In a place like Detroit with extreme and wide spread poverty, how do you justify investing capital in something like the Mothership?

AS: Yes, we’ve thought about it so often: having just invested $30,000 into designing and fabricating a neighborhood icon in the form of a golden spaceship. And we could have used that money to salvage a dozen roofs. If you just change the asphalt shingles, you are going to save all these at risk properties from water-damage. But in the end, that might be a kind of short-term investment. If you create an object that is well-designed and offers a sense of identity to a historic neighborhood, an object that helps transmit stories of people that have been underrepresented in the dominant renaissance narrative, then perhaps the intangible power and prowess of the design artifact is much greater than the tangle impact of a renovation. It is really difficult for us to quantify how the mothership has impacted the sense of place in a community. But I believe its presence is important.

AS: Participatory design is a very charged term because it has an entire history. Since the 60s architecture has established a number of tropes about how it’s done, its methods and measures.

If we ask ourselves, have we followed a participatory design tactic or strategy? We have not. What we have done is that we

JL: The Mothership is a long-term investment. We try not to do Band-Aid beautification projects. There are lots of projects that are critical first respondents that work on mitigating or alleviating the issues of the day to day: water, power, education, and violence. The work being done is very important, but that is not our approach. In the end, the images we produce might not be understood as direct assistance, but they are not pejorative, they’re projective and celebratory and committed to creating situations were ensuring a sense of dignity and delight are conceptual drivers.

Pop Stars, Amilly, France

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have listened to a lot of stories, many testimonies about how people perceive their neighborhood, the neighborhood’s history, the real and projected values of place. There are so many stories and impressions that come from the every neighborhood. As designers we are able to unify them, to cull them, and to figure out which of the narratives are the most promising and uniting and which could be materialized into physical form. I think that lots of people participated in sharing their stories but as designers we worked very hard in collaboration with local artists, activists, and residents to craft the narrative into a format for public dissemination. I think that is the skill that is critical to architectural practice in the public realm, but it often goes under considered.

JLF: But we live in a collective world. So everybody has a skill. Everybody has a role. And everyone’s skills need to be a connected into a unified whole to make impact. And when you work with residents in Detroit, you can’t help but react to what you hear and what you feel. The critical feedback you get can be challenging, but it is a very good way to learn. Public criticism is necessary because we cannot be right 100 percent of the time, that would be amazing but it’s not the case. You have to listen when there is a critique and try to figure out what is the mistake

of the design, what is the attitude the design should take, how to improve what you are doing and to be more genuinely connected with the people around you.

AS: Yes, I also think that architecture without programming has no significance. I wouldn’t say that designing things in conjunction with people and events isn’t necessary participatory, but it’s invariably collaborative with all of the collaborators deeply involved in the conceptualization of the programming, the space, the narratives, the political stance, the relationship to social advocacy in the city, etc.

SO: What kind of historic and aesthetic precedence drives your practice?

AS: We look very closely at cultural precedents that are in the popular sensibility of a place, and we make a concerted effort to depend too seriously on architectural precedent as conceptual inspiration. So we look at poetry, we look at music, record album covers, advertising, fashion, anything but the stylistic and historical development of form in the discipline itself.

SO: How does music tie to your work?

JLF: I think music ties to everything in Detroit. Detroit i¬s the most important generator of vanguard sounds for the last sixty years, and if you want to work in Detroit you need to be in contact with the music. What we’ve learned is that musicians are cultural creators, they are designers, they are artists, and they represent a very important community in the city. They have in some ways designed a global music industry. That design needs to be a part of the urban planning, it needs to be part of the life of the city. I cannot stress that enough.

SO: Are you trying to create a signature Detroit style?

JLF: We don’t agree about that. I think the culture of the city did influence our work. Now if we were in Chinatown in San Francisco, that culture would have influenced our work. It’s just the context, the work expresses the culture circumstances of where it is produces. This Is very important to have an influence so that you don’t become a top-down kind of designer where you say this is the rule, this is the form, and the form needs to be this way.

learn more about the work at akoaki.com

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ANN CARTER MAKES JAM

THE CHEF BEHIND DETROIT’S FRESHEST JAM interview James Lesko the Center for Community Based Enterprise

Meet Ann Carter of AfroJam, the first business-incubator project of Oakland Avenue Urban Farm. AfroJam furthers the Farm’s efforts to create a vibrant locally rooted economy in Detroit’s North End through urban agriculture, cultural programming and sustainable design.

James Lesko: What do you most like about cooking?

Ann Carter: Food is my passion. I love to see people enjoy the food that I make. I love doing it. They don’t even have to say, “This is good,” you can tell from the expressions on their faces, it’s like “yummmummmm’. And that just gives me joy.

JL: How did AfroJam come to be?

AC: At the Farm we knew that we needed an added-value product besides the fresh fruits and vegetables we sell at the farm stand on Oakland Avenue and in the five Chrysler plants. And I found I enjoyed working with the fruit, how it changes—how we can make something that was already good, even better. You know? And so many people enjoyed it.

So we thought, ‘let’s do this…why not try?

JL: What are people saying about your jams?

AC: People love the jams. They say it’s gooood. They say they haven’t had good jam in a lot of years. Their grandmothers made jam or their great-great-grandmothers but people stop

doing it, you know. It became convenient to go to the store and buy it already made. So this is something new that we’re bringing back to the city. Bringing back to our heritage. And to anyone who wants to have fresh homemade jams.”

JL: Why is AfroJam important to you…and to Detroit?

AC: It’s always been a dream of mine to start a business but I never knew how to go about it; when you don’t know how to do something you sometimes put that on the back burner. But we decided to do it right here in this community. For one, it will create jobs, and sustainability for people who society says are unemployable. I think that if you can teach someone to do something, they can live a lifetime off of doing that. So we want to train people how to make their owns foods, teach how to can, teach them to live healthier lives. But most importantly, it is to give people pride in what they do and let them know that they’re worthy and have value. Everybody has a gift. It may not be jam, but maybe it’s out here picking the berries. Maybe it’s digging a hole to plant something…because everyone is useful. And that’s what we want everyone to know: that you’re important and that no one is without worth. You train people and people can grow.

We should learn something new every day.

JL: So what’s your secret ingredient?

AC: I think the most important thing about AfroJam is we’re here in the community. We’re here in the city of Detroit.

You can always stop by, knock on the door and watch me make the jams, you can see what I’m putting in, you can see that there’s no additives…and that we get pleasure in the camaraderie in the kitchen. And that we love and we laugh and we cook together. And that ingredient…with the ingredients in the pot, is pure gold (laughing)…pure gold.”

You can sample the current batch of strawberry and raspberry AfroJam at Oakland Avenue Urban Farm’s Saturday market, 11am to 3:30pm, through early October, weather permitting.

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A TIME TO PROJECT AND PRO-ACT NEW IMAGES, SOUNDS AND NARRATIVES? BLACK DETROIT words & artwork MASIMBA HWATI

images Smac gallery, Capetown

Masimba Hwati is a Zimbabwean artist, known for unconventional three-dimensional mixed media sculptures. Hwati studied at the Harare Polytechnic from 2001 to 2003 where he majored in Ceramics and Painting he currently teaches Drawing and Sculpture at Harare Polytechnic. His work explores the transformation and evolution of knowledge systems that are indigenous to his own background whilst experimenting with the symbolism and perceptions attached to cultural objects, expressed as an art movement known as “The Energy of Objects�. His current work juxtaposes intense cultural objects and symbols with trivia and seemingly ephemeral mainstream symbols and Icons. His works use contemporary and historical themes. He also works extensively with found objects, transforming existing artifacts into antennas and gadgets of memory. His research grows around exploration of postcolonial themes by re-appropriating archives and objects and presenting them in new contexts. With an emphasis on sculptural work, Hwati collects historical, culturally imbued items ranging from cars and shoes, to scrap metal and found objects, altering and repositioning them in a contemporary urban setting. His work has been shown in place like Germany, France, Canada, and London, The United states of America, Australia and southern Africa. In 2015 he represented his country at the 56th edition of the Venice Biennale in Italy. Masimba has worked and researched in Places like Capetown, Avignon France, Nova Scotia Halifax, and Detroit Michigan. He is currently a resident artists at Popps Packing in Hamtramck, Detroit, Michigan.

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I come from a school of thought that people gravitate towards that which is constantly projected before them. The Zezuru people in Zimbabwean culture, as in most cultures on the Afrikan Continent, are primarily and a profoundly visual people. A greater percentage of communication patterns including the Symbol, metaphor and proverb have root in the visual aspect of life. My time in Detroit has been filled with wonder, comparison and learning. The word “Alive” best describes the Detroit art scene. I have a special Interest in Black Detroit not only because I’m Afrikan but because the Black American story is yet to be fully told and owned by its own people…but how do you own a future story?

“Until Lions have their own historians, Tales of the hunt will always glorify the Hunter” African Proverb

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Today I would, however, augment the meaning of the word Historians and replace it with Projectionists. Projectionists function in the office of “Prophets” they observe the times and study history but are neither preoccupied by the present or the past. Instead they liberate themselves from the constraints of the afore mentioned definitions of time, and they create and nurture fragile future Images, sounds ideas and atmospheres hoping that their own people will grow to become those images. I have deep respect for Afrikan American people. This particular group of people have had to fight harder for the right to “Being” and continue rightly so in the face of atrocious racial vices and apparatus in their environments. The struggle today is in place that’s both beautiful and critical in that Afrikan American Artists in history have managed to ground and locate black people in the reality of their circumstance and more so to challenge and respond to stereotypes and constructs associated with the Afrikan American in this country especially the Afrikan American Male species.

May I submit to you the following opinion: Art is as powerful or as relevant a tool as the intentions of the person(s) who owns it?

In Zezuru cosmology we have a proverb that says “Chisichako masimba mashoma” which means you only claim power of definition over that which you own”. This is why repatriation processes must continue for the ancestral works of art stolen from the Afrikan continent. Vices such as Illicit trafficking of

Cultural objects must be challenged with retroactive instruments that will allow Afrikans and Indigenous peoples and all over the world to take back their Art from former colonizers or pillagers of the Meme (cultural gene), heritage and Art. In This context, I would like to encourage the continuation of the notion of growing and cultivating Afrikan American collectors of contemporary Afrikan American Art. It is still questionable to have other groups of people as major collectors and presenters of such Important Afrikan American exhibitions such as 30 American Voices. I do not advocate for separation or segregation of any race especially in the art world, which is a space, we all share. I, however, think that Afrikans and Afrikan Americans committed to projecting and Pro-acting new narratives and Images of their own people need reflect on the fact that Art is a tool and is only powerful as the intentions of the one who owns it. Perhaps this is the time for us to de-perpetuate the Idea of the Afrikan as the producer of cultural goods and think of him as the consumer and proprietor of these bodies of Cultural Knowledge. The Absence of black Consumption balance in Art tends to perpetuate the emasculation of powerful black Narratives and Images. I admire the work of Dr Charles Wright in building a Legacy of History for the African American Community in Detroit. The work of Dr George N’namdi cannot go unnoticed as a positive development and hope for cultivating more Afrikan American collectors of contemporary Art.

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As much as art can be commodified, I’m of the opinion of that it is irresponsibly dangerous for Afrikans and Afrikan Americans to yield ownership of their Artistic expressions to other groups of people especially to former colonizers and former enslavers.

This is because In Early Africa colonizers made it a point to loot cultural objects and the art of Afrikan communities and proceeded to use them as objects of Inquiry to study the African Meme (cultural Gene) and also to selectively represent images that served their best interest. When Cecil John Rhodes led the Pioneer Column in 1890 to annex the Region of Mashonaland in Zimbabwe he made a point to loot the best articles of creative and cultural significance as a means of studying the Indigenous people to arm himself with subtle cultural information for the future success of the colonial machinery. The Afrikan Continent today is still battling with issues of neo-colonialism and cultural hegemony because of loss of critical cultural information, which has either been hidden from them or misappropriated. The afore mentioned vices are made successful because of cultural products that are designed to psychologically distort and gentrify black culture and most of these products are delivered through instruments such as television and other mediums.

Several reports say that black and minority children watch more television than any other groups of people in America (the same can be said about Afrika). This could rightly be termed “psychological gentrification” a word coined by Dr. George N’namdi in 2005.This is possible because Neo-colonial cultural

designers use intricate Cultural information gleaned from stolen and museumized memes to create counter products that psychologically gentrify targeted groups of indigenous people.

The question is how are these groups of people responding to this state of affairs? Recent studies show that Afrikan Americans consume more television products that any other group in America .It is observed that Marketers and advertisers spend $ 75 billion on television only $ 2.24 billion of that sum is invested towards media focused on black people. Clearly there is need to create critical cultural content and appetite for Black Audiences.

A million dollar question can be phrased as follows: Do Africans on the Continent and in diaspora understand the times that we are in at the present moment? Is this the time of imprisoning ourselves in the negativity of our times, or a time of reacting to negative stereotypes and constructs that has been presented before us? I strongly believe this is a time to project and pro -Act what we want to become. Maybe a time to Interrogate labels even self-imposed one too, sometimes I feel that the “black label/Brand” has been used so much in protest art and movements such that it has morphed into an albatross that has diverted our attention from more important things. In zezuru we have a proverb that says “Haikona Kupedzera museve kunana Dhimba Hanga dzichauya” it simply means do not waste your arrows on smaller prey because the lager prey will come, its only a matter of time. Everything around us confirms that this

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is the time of projection and Pro-action for black Detroit and black people around the world. We cannot afford the cost of forgetting history neither can we be naïve about the here and now, but at the same time we must invest more in the aspect of history that speaks of a victorious heritage and legacy and above all project the future. My heart sank when I encountered the slave ship section in the Charles Wright Museum of Afrikan American History. I wasn’t saddened because my people where dehumanized by the vice of slavery but I was sad that my people chose to invest more resources in projecting a part of the story that details defeat more than they invested in other narratives of victory in the same story.

Why not invest more resources and attention in Victorious narratives such as the 1811 slave rebellion of Louisiana, The Amistad rebellion led by Cinque, the Creole Rebellion in the early 1840’s .Black American history does not fall short of Heroes talk of Fredrick Douglass, Harriet Taubman, and Gaspar Yangar of Veracruz. Why not built and recreate larger than life narratives around these heroes? Countless other Heroic stories live on the African continent which are at the disposal of Afrikans in the Diaspora. There is a need to de-perpetuate the selective apparatus that has focus fixed on negative portrayal of black people. I admire the work of Kehinde Wiley for addressing some of these issues at the right time around the early 2000 ‘s. I have

respect for Tyree Guyton for grounding people in their present reality of demise in the late 1980’s. I respect the work of Nick Cave for realizing the need of our current times and projecting new images pro-acting important processes and directly Borrowing Ideas from the Afrikan continent around dance ritual and costumage and translating these to a wider audience. This time on the Afrikan psycho-social and political calendar is a time to consider Marx, Brecht and Mayakovski’s beliefs that art is not a mirror to hold up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.

Notes:

Zezuru-A Clan found predominantly in northern region of the Southern African country of Zimbabwe, the majority ethnic group in Zimbabwe.

Afrikan-adopting this spelling is a conscious and rebellious reference to an Afrika free of slavery, Colonization and hegemonic frames of reference.

“Until Lions have their own historians, Tales of the hunt will always glorify the Hunter”: African Proverb (Igbo) –Believed to have come from the Igbo tribe in Nigeria, The Igbo are an ethnic group of southeastern Nigeria.

“Chisichako Masimba mashoma” shona proverb-Directly translated

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you have limited power over those things that you don’t own D.I.A-Detroit Institute of the Arts Address: 5200 Woodward Ave, Detroit, MI 48202, United States.

30 American Voices – 30 Americans showcases works by many of the most important African American artists of the last three decades.

This provocative exhibition focuses on issues of racial, sexual, and historical identity in contemporary culture while exploring the powerful influence of artistic legacy and community across generations. Recently a travelling exhibition shown in some City Galleries in the United States at The Detroit Institute of the Arts.

Afrofuturism- is a literary and cultural aesthetic that combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-Western cosmologies in order to critique not only the present-day dilemmas of people of color, but also to revise, interrogate, and re-examine the historical events of the past. First coined by Mark Dery in 1993 in his Essay Black to the future. https:// thenewblack5324.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/mark-dery-black-tothe-future.pdf Dr Charles Wright Museum of African American History Address: 315 E Warren Ave, Detroit, MI 48202, United States Dr George N’namdi- G R N’namdi Gallery Address: 52 E Forest Ave, Detroit, MI 48201, United States.

26 March 1902 was a British colonial-era businessman, mining magnate, and politician in South Africa. An ardent believer in British colonialism, Rhodes was the founder of the southern African territory of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe and Zambia), which was named after him in 1895.

Tyree Guyton- Tyree Guyton is an artist from Detroit, Michigan.

Cofounder of the Heidelberg Project in Detroit east side www. heidelberg.org Nick cave- Nick Cave is an American fabric sculptor, dancer, and performance artist. He is best known for his Sound suits: wearable fabric sculptures that are bright, whimsical, and other-worldly www. cranbrookart.edu/museum/nickcave/exhibition/ Karl Marx, was a German philosopher, economist, communist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist.

Bertolt Brecht- was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director of the 20th century http://www.britannica.com/biography/BertoltBrecht.

Vladimir Vladimiroviç Mayakovski was the leading Russian Futurist poet of the 20th century who created an entirely new form of Russian poetryhttps://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/m/a. htm#mayakovsky-vladimir

Cecil John Rhodes- Cecil John Rhodes born 5 July 1853 -died

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ZA’NYIA KELLY POET, PILOT, GARDNER

interview Linda Cassells imaginary scenography Sam Okolita & Jonathan Watkins

Poet, pilot, photographer, gardener, and culinary artist-- meet Za’Nyia Kelly, whose name means strength and strong will. Recent graduate of Benjamin O’Davis Aerospace High School, she is headed to Michigan State this fall to pursue study in agricultural science. She is the coordinator for Know Allegiance Nation, and teaches poetry to youth, as well as coordinates monthly poetry meet-ups with Illuminate Crew in the North End. Linda Cassells recently met up with Za’Nyia to talk about

LC: Let me ask you this, how did your family or friends decide on your name?

ZK: Oh [laughs]. My mom just told me this story, and it is always slightly different... So, my great grandma who is still alive, bless her heart, she was in the hospital for something minor at the same time I was born. And my great-aunt who became my godmother, she said something she kept coming from my granny’s room, coming between my granny’s room and my mom’s room, like, coming with different names and my grandma decided to name me Za’Nyia. My grandma and my mom, they were all like, deciding and Za’Nyia came along and they looked up the meaning and it meant strength and strong will.

LC: Oh how nice! So your grandmother named you.

ZK: My grandmother and my aunt all pitched in.

LC: Now I believe that you enjoy gardening, reading, poetry, the arts and you are definitely interested in culinary arts, right? So tell me what plans you have? Are you thinking about, I think I read about you, are you thinking about owning a bakery at some point?

ZK: [laughs] So, since what you read, since then, my plans have kind of changed and everything but I am definitely still in the works, just later on in life... My plan now, after I graduate from Davis, I am going to Michigan State for, basically farming, for agricultural sciences, sustainable growing and I think I might major in botany and nutrition. I would be focused on those fields.

Think if I am going to do food I should start from the ground up.

LC: You seem to be a very happy, creative person.

ZK: I’m glad I come off that way.

LC: Aww, and this is something I want you to think about for a second. How does your sense of creativity help you deal with life’s challenges sometimes?

ZK: ...It’s really hard to talk about me because, looking back

and comparing myself to other people, I do a lot of stuff but it just seems normal because that is what I have always done. So, creativity to me is like the norm. Just looking at my response to problems in general. Growing up I have learned a lot of different mediums to express myself and give my message across, to just communicate with other people, with myself and sometimes with no one at all. Creativity has helped me a lot because sometimes I am trying to convey this message verbally, and it is not coming out properly, and then I decide to try meditating on it. I may do a vision for it, or I may just draw a picture. I may create a sculpture. So it helps me in expressing my emotions or fully finding proper solutions…so holistically...

LC: What inspired you to be a poet? Where did you get your inspiration?

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poetry party. So everybody brought a pie. For poetry I had Dina, who’s awesome. Deena, an Illuminate graduate as well, won first place in the Illuminate slam last year for her age group. She was my opener, and Jamii, my poetry mentor, did some poetry, it was really cool. So that, and booking gigs and doing this later on at the Louder Than A Bomb. I may be the sacrificial poet, who’s just the poet who goes after the actual slam, just to give the judges a basepoint on how they want to grade.

onto cardstock. I’ve sold a couple... And I’m currently making one for one of my friends, Aalia Mohamad, a Know Allegiance Nation intern, which is an organization that Illuminate and two other programs are under. I’m doing one for her mom.

LC: This organization sounds wonderful, you guys have classes when?

ZK: Class is on Friday in the summer. The graduates of Illuminate also get together so we can keep our skills polished... We have a bi-monthly meeting.

LC: I think you anwered it, but can you tell us a little more about what emotion you write about?

LC: Tell me a little more about the people involved.

ZK: Any emotion would just be that, not just only me, but that we’re here, and that we won’t be quiet and that we have a voice and that we know how to use it, and we have education, and we’re literate. We know how to utilize our voice and our words, and bring upon message, and empower not only listeners, but us through our voices.

LC: What about chapbooks?

ZK: We were in class one day and Jamii Tata encourages us to hone in on the ability to properly be an entrepreneur, and to take what you learned as a poet and to apply it to the business realm, live off of it. It’s so often you hear, I’m a starving artist. And that’s something really important that Jamii teaches us. So we’re sitting in class one day and he was like okay today is about chapbooks.

He took a blank piece of paper and folded it a certain way and he told us write your poem on it. So we wrote our poems and make it look nice. It was just a simple piece of copy paper. I like art so I went home and I went all out. I got cardstock, thick watercolor paper, two sheets of it and folded it in half. The first one wasn’t even intentionally for like selling, I was making it for a super special friend who introduced me to Illuminate, Yakuza Moon, a.k.a Khafre. So I got some cool pen markers from Blick in Midtown, and I did some cool edging on the paper, and I did an elephant design. I went all out.I calligraphed all my poems.

I felt cool, I felt like a boss. So I showed Jamii, and he said, sell them. And I was like no, but he said sell it. So I stitched together one, stitched the spine, so it looked like a book. And that’s sort of how the chapbook started. And all of them are handmade. The second one I did was butterfly, it was a pattern almost. It was a little different, you know. Incorporating all the different kinds of creativity, you know the art and the poetry. The entrepreneur thought of it, it just bring something cool with it?

LC: Nice. Did you sell any of them?

ZK: Yeah. What I do is I make a master copy, then I copy them

ZK: We have Aalia Mohamad, she’s awesome. She’s a writer, and you have 11 year olds. We have this one kid—I’m sorry, woman. She’s super young, Aziza, as tall as a table, and she is a powerhouse. And she always holds her own. But it’s kind of embarrassing to have like 11 year olds against 17 year olds. And it’s not that they can’t keep up, but you have to judge on two different things, so the score is kind of wacky. So we split it up into age groups, but now that we have Aalia, there will be a an Illuminate that’s called the Nighlights and that’s from ages 7-12.

Then the age 13-18 group is called the Illuminate Entrepreneurs.

LC: How has this organization helped address illiteracy problems in Detroit?

ZK: it’s never just literacy, it’s never just poetry with Illuminate, with Jamii, with Know Allegiance Nation. it’s a tool. This is what it’s called. This is it’s impact. This is how you use it. This is how it’s been used throughout history, and so much more. So just being less ignorant to the world in general through the discussions we have and the current events we talk about. It helps me further educate myself and peers around me. I go to my little brother and say well this is what this word means, and here’s your word for the day and, so just getting in the practice of sharing the knowledge on a more consistent basis, I feel has made an impact.

LC: Do you feel that you have benefitted as much from the classes as the paid performances?

ZK: Absolutely... At my school talent show, I knew, when I got on the stage, people were waiting to hear me speak. And as I got older I got quieter, I needed to learn humility. That was a big lesson I needed to learn. I’m learning that being an introvert, and needing to learn humility, there’s a middle ground. And the middle ground is where I’m getting to now in this stage of life.

So my paid gigs have helped me to learn that it gave me the

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to my poems and I’m looking and I’m like I’m a revolutionary poet at this moment in time. So most of my poems have been about empowerment, or revolution, and resurrection even, if you’d like to use such a strong word. That’s what it is, and it’s never intentional. Usually when I do my poems, it’s usually just what I’m feeling, what I’m thinking. and the best way I feel like that message could be put out there. Sometimes, it’s just what I’m doing, or it’s just spur of the moment. I remember waking up one day and—this is a famous poem that people seem to like, from me—I was asleep, and I woke up and it was the day of one of our Illuminate open mics, and I had a dream. And I had fallen asleep next to my notepad, and my paper, and I just woke up and I wrote based off what the dream made me feel. And it’s really abstract, but it gets to some point at the end.

ZK: I’ve been doing poetry for a really long time. In elementary school, I remember I was in it really heavy, around like fourth grade. So it’s been a while. And I remember I went to Nsoroma Institute, shout out to Nsoroma, it just closed down recently: an African Center school, it was so small and community oriented, you felt safe. So just being in that environment really young, I started expressing my opinions and my ideas and everything I had through poetry. I’m not sure how it happened, it may have just started in class one day and branched off on it’s own. It started there and as I got older, I became more of an introvert, instead of exchanging more, which is weird. Cause I started not doing performances or anything out there. And then the older I got, the more closed in I got. Just recently, maybe in the past year or so, I got back into poetry with a group called Illuminate Literacy Entrepreneurs. And I’ve gotten back into the poetry scene.

LC: Okay, well I’d like to read it. What’s the name of it?

LC: You took a break this past year?

ZK: “I woke up like this”. Because, that’s how I woke up.

ZK: It was more so, like I still wrote. I might be sweeping the floor, and a poem will just come to me. And I have to hurry and run and get some paper. I have to hurry and just write it down quickly. Just recently a friend of mine says, “You know, we have poetry classes, you should come.” I started going to Illuminate’s poetry classes at Jamii Tata’s house. And now I’ve been intentionally doing poems.

LC: Can you give me a few line from that poem? Or would you have to read it?

ZK: Okay.

He split eternity and forever at the heel of my mother’s callous foot Like two sides of the same quarter 25 to 50 cent he double his cent to make sense Trying to make sense of a currency with no value

LC: What impact your poerty? What about music? Does it impact your poetry at all?

LC: So you mentioned you still go to the open mics they have every fourth Saturday?

ZK: Anything that gives me feelings impacts my poetry. Whether it’s something someone said to me who knows how long ago, or whether it’s just emotion I was feeling, a movie I was watching, current or not so current events in the world. And definitely music. I’m not the best with rhythm ironically, so music is something I really envy. I love musicians who can just move their body and who can use their voice or their hands to make beats, it’s really amazing to me. So just to listen to music and be moved so much is just inspiring.

ZK: Yep. I’m the coordinator this year. So look out for that. I promise it will be even better than the last time. I have all the features and the openers lined up already.

LC: Are there any other ways that you have managed to make your poetry more accessible to listeners and readers? What else as well as open mic?

LC: What are some topics or some ideas that your poems deal with. Or are there broad topics, or is it one day it’s this, one day it’s that? If you think about the poems you’ve written this past year, what do they center on?

ZK: So, at 17, soon to be 18, this year getting ready to be a freshman in college, I’m at a transitional stage of adulthood, so a lot of my poems, subconsciously--- oh! And not only that, just being in Detroit, and seeing the movement in Detroit, whether it’s food or poetry, or music , or whatever the case may be, I’ve went

ZK: So believe it or not, I’m extremely shy. When I’m comfortable around people, I get really outgoing. But I still get really nervous talking in front of people, talking or spitting poetry... So that was one of my goals to work on, to be more comfortable on stage.

Doing it for a purpose. What’s the point of doing the poems and people can’t hear it if they don’t have a way to get to it... So, other than the open mics, I’ve made an EP, an Extended Play. I think it had about 5 poems, other than my most known poems.

So, and I had an EP release party. It was the pie potluck and

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ability to gain confidence. As far as people are paying to hear my speak, and it’s not just like oh cool poetry, it’s like, I heard you at an open mic and you were awesome so come to my event. Just the fact that people can see me and love this, that’s awesome.

LC: Can you speak a little about your experiences in school?

ZK: Yeah, transferring from a chartered school that was ethnic centered, that was small, that was family-oriented and then going into Detroit Public School system. I’m not saying my school isn’t loving or isn’t family-oriented, but it is still different. It was a big change for me. So, it has helped me find myself again and find my voice because for a very long time, I didn’t speak my full mind. It is in my poetry. I had a complex that, I can say this, but I cannot show you the face behind these words, and be okay with that. So it’s been that and this year I am a senior so it is you know college essay this and, this a billion page paper, this has definitely helped my writing skills on a very basic level as well.

LC: 10 or 20 years from now, what effect do you want your written or spoken words to have on this community?

ZK: What effect would I want my words to have? The same effect it has always had. That is one thing, I have a lot of poetry that I don’t share because of more personal reasons. But the poetry I do share is with intent, well so far, well I can’t speak for 10, 20 years, but so far I don’t want that intent to change, that intent for a reason. I want my poetry to exemplify confidence and my story, but not only my story, anybody who can relate to that story. I want my poems and my words to be able to touch people.

That’s one of the things that makes a poem or any work of art important or worthy of mentioning. It brought forth feeling or thought. You have a lot of stuff that sounds cool, but I don’t feel it. It’s cool to hear when I am like riding past wherever.

LC: Something that’s deeper...

ZK: People will feel my words, meaning behind the words, or the meaning behind the words and take something from it that is beneficial, whatever that may be, or whatever message that may be, whether it was my intention or not...

LC: So you talked about college and getting those essays out.

ZK: I have always been a good writer, but it has taken my writing skills to another level. There are so many scholarships that require essays and to make my paper stand out through my speech is really important.

LC: That’s good! What advice would you give young writers?

LC: All these experiences that you’ve had, I think that’s exciting.

What has been the best advice that has been given to you about being a writer, or poet?

ZK: I’ve gotten a lot. I know it’s from Jamii. I’m paraphrasing here.

He’s always blunt but it’s always for a reason. So he’s like you know people are going to see you, you’re going to be up there, so go. Give it all you’ve got. There’s no point in being up there if you can’t do your best. And then, listen. Once you do your best, and if your best isn’t what you feel is enough, then do it again.

LC: Do you have a favorite poet?

ZK: So, I’m super indecisive. But my longstanding favorite poet is, hmm. Saul Williams. Saul is beautiful, like I love his hair. He’s not young, he’s been in the game for a minute. The diction, the words he chooses, he is so powerful, his words, his voice, and the meaning behind it. It’s the feeling he exudes, and the feeling he brings forth is amazing. Even written, the way he writes, the way he composes his poetry books, it all has meaning. So being so purposeful with his words and understanding the importance and seriousness of it, and the honesty in his words, and the fact that I can relate to his message is why he’s one of my favorites.

ZK: Just be comfortable. Don’t be afraid to compromise, and I don’t mean to compromise your character or your ideals, nothing like that or your ethics, nothing important. Know why you’re doing it. Be comfortable where you are, but be comfortable advancing and changing. To have a goal is to get somewhere different from where you are currently. Be comfortable with then steps you have to take to get there. It has become a very used term in the No Allegiance Nation circle when talking about Jamii, when he tells us to do things. So, maybe the first day I met him my mom is bad at being punctual. I love his house and after class when we were playing the question game. He asked me basically what do you wanna get from the program? I was like I want to be able to be comfortable in front of people. I want to be comfortable delivering my message. It’s way less effective if people can’t feel it. So, he has always been throwing me on the stage at any given moment with no type of preparation and [imitating Jamii Tata], “There is no host we need a host.” And I say, “I don’t even know what the event is!” So, it gets me uncomfortable. but that is what it takes to get to your goal, and I think those are the steps that are the steps towards your goal.

learn more about Know Allegiance Nation and Illuminate Open Mic on: knowallegiance.wordpress.com and follow events on FB

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DARK OBJECTS DISCOVERING ZIMBABWE AND SELF EXPRESSION WITH JONNI UJAMA PAIGE photography Jean Louis Farges

When Jonni is not drawing, designing accessories, or prototyping industrial objects, she is thinking about how her work might make positive impact in the city and beyond. We caught up with her on a hot afternoon at the Detroit African Bead Museum where she shared a little about her work and recent journey to Zimbabwe...

ONE Mile: Tell us a little about your work.

JUP: I make graphite drawings, usually dark objects, where it’s harder to pull light from them... I like to draw dark leather, brass, three dimensional dark materials. It’s a reference to Detroit.

When people think of Detroit, they often think of one thing: the poverty, the bad stuff that’s going on. But they don’t see the light that’s in Detroit. I work to draw out that light.

OM: If someone from Europe said, “Oh, you live in Detroit, what does it look like?” What would tell them about your city?

JUP: It’s beautiful! Detroit, to me, that’s what comes to the top of my mind. You know, a lot of the aspects of Detroit are hidden.

So, if you’re coming to the city and you’re not familiar with it, a lot of the beauty in Detroit is hidden. It’s hidden underneath the abandoned buildings people see. They don’t know that actually a lot of the buildings they think are abandoned, aren’t actually abandoned. They may have galleries or art installations or other functions. So, there is a lot of beauty that’s coming from the city.

OM: What is your vision, in terms of your work in art? Where do you see it going?

JUP: I would like to work with refugees to develop some type of prototype to benefit them..., I would like to help building community people without a homeland. When you encounter

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people who have had their homeland taken from them, or even in Detroit, the huge homeless community... I would want to help create opportunities people wouldn’t normally have, to work for a group of people that are otherwise overlooked, and have someone notice them, to know somebody wants to contribute to their experience. We can grow off of each other together.

OM: How did you become sensitized to issues of displacement?

JUP: For the past month, I travelled to Zimbabwe with Chido Johnson and students from the College for Creative Studies as a part of an artist exchange between Detroit and Zimbabwe called ZCCD. During my travels I spent a few days in Tongogara Refugee Camp (TRC) which is about seven hours outside of Harare, Zimbabwe near the Mozambique border. Alone, I traveled to Mutare, a city near TRC, to meet up with my contact from the refugee camp. While I was in the camp I met people from Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda. I went into the camp to study refugee culture as a part of my research to improve a prototype I designed for food storage but in return I received much more. I heard horrifying stories of genocide and survival. There were times I would walk off and break down crying because of the conditions of the camp. The people there did not even have what I believed to be “basic necessities” but as I found out, those “necessities” were not needed to find true happiness.

To see young girls behind shacks laughing and playing games brought tears to my eyes. My contact is raising a young child by herself and has no family because she witnessed her parents being slaughtered and thrown into a ditch at six years old.

Refugees like her live with those horrors haunting them unable to sleep at night and yet still have a smile on their faces in the morning. Refugees are powerful people. They are true soldiers and they are the light amongst the darkness that is plaguing Sub-Saharan Africa.

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#DETROITAFRIKANS verse Bryce Detroit

No holding back, going full-throttle.

World stages, looking like a model.

Model behaviors, by building new models.

Bottle occasions; bring out the models.

I’m out here; Mothership.

Light-years; I’m on ‘another’ trip.

They fabricating, I don’t “trip”, We fabricated our own Ship!

I’m on my P’s and Q-tip.

My Tribe, bake a pie take a slice, how we do “flips”.

Re-invest, make the stew thick.

We eating decent.

Family not eatin’, causes dissent in your team; keep your Team fit.

We ‘get green’ like vegans.

For protein, when we speak in integrity we keep it.

Build a bond, got us flexxin’ like a muscle while geekin’!

Tweak my levels til they crispy.

Used to crease khakis til they crispy.

When I pull up, count’em“BUCKETS”, means she did not ‘miss me’.

Never press her, complimentingtell her, “let’s do something complimentary.”

When she’s ‘open’, then apply the ‘D’.

We up, and it’s our time you see.

The blind can see.

Not bout my People, then they blind to me. “monkey do, monkey see”.

King Kong, got nothing on Me. King Kong, got nothing on Me. They bang their chest loud; I’m cutting-edge.

I’m ‘right now’, and sounding like ‘the best out’.

I’m draped-Up and dressed-Down, “to the nines”, got 10 proud.

DETROIT

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Center for Community-Based Enterprise

C2BE provides technical assistance, education and collaboration to develop cooperatives, community based enterprises and a mutual support network—including a pool of shared capital—providing one of the bedrocks upon which Detroit’s solidarity economy is being built.

www.c2be.org

Dr. Makeeba Ellington

THE ABSTRACT ORACLE

SAVE YOUR SOUL SUNDAYS | ABSTRACT SCENTS | NOMADIC GALLERY | SPIRITUAL READINGS theabstractoracle.org

Update: Community Benefits Ordinance Signatures Qualified for November Ballot and Immediately Challenged Successful grassroots Community Benefits Movement in Detroit threatened by anonymous legal challenge.

On Monday June 27, 2016, the City of Detroit Department of Elections certified the Community benefits Agreement Coalition had collected enough signatures to place the long-sought Community Benefits Ordinance on the ballot in November. As required by law, a letter was sent to City Council thereby giving them 60 days to pass the ordinance as written or refer it to the Election Commission for placement on the ballot in November.

Within 48 hours efforts to challenge the Community Benefit Ordinance were underway.

On Wednesday, CBA Coalition members learned of a legal challenge filed against the ballot initiative. One of Detroit’s leading corporate law firms, working on behalf of an unidentified, anonymous client, has challenged the validity of signatures collected.

CBA Coalition partners will be working today to confirm the details of this challenge and will share more information as it becomes available.

This has been a tremendous effort and an important act of citizen-led democracy on display. The CBA Coalition partners want to thank the members who have supported and made this all-volunteer grassroots effort possible. Detroiters from every corner of the city have stepped up to help move the CBA Ordinance to a vote by the people, and we will continue the fight.

Please visit http://www.risetogetherdetroit.com/ for more information and updates on the efforts to gain a Community Benefits Ordinance for all Detroiters. “If we have to pay, we get a say!� #RiseTogether #DetroitCBA

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know allegiance nation knowallegiance.wordpress.com August 28, 2016 | 11AM - 4PM | EASTERN MARKET, DETROIT

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*** O.N.E. Mile is made possible through the generous support of the Knight Arts Foundation, ArtPlace America, and Creative Many’s Resonant Detroit Program.

Special thanks to SXSW Eco for recognizing the ONE Mile project with a Place by Design Award, 2016.

The O.N.E. Mile Magazine is kindly underwritten by the Oakland Avenue Urban Farm, Detroit Recordings, C2BE, Fellow Citizen, Akoaki, and the Free Market of Detroit.

Many thanks to the countless, wonderful people who have participated in O.N.E. Mile’s events, shared their stories and wisdom, and contributed to the collective vibe.

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