…When I moved into this zone over three years ago, I was mystified by the beautiful melancholy, the bizarre poetics, the stories, the deep and broad African American cultural traditions, and the urban legends of
the place. This place is poetic. It is charged with movement—cars endlessly stream up and down the major streets surrounding my bank turned studio/apartment. Bounded by major streets including Gratiot
Avenue, Mt. Elliott, and Vernor Highway, in a post-industrial corridor just 2 miles from downtown Detroit proper, this little 0.385 square mile slice of Detroit’s East Side is a fantastic, strange, culturally rich place
painfully impacted by intersecting forces of failed capitalism and unresolved social inequity, and utterly pulsating with art, religion, newness, oldness, decay, tradition, innovation, realism, persistence, optimism.
McDougall Hunt itself shakes and writhes with art and I’m convinced it spoke to me through its concrete and tall grass grip to start this project….
Contributed by
Elka Krajewska + Gregor Neuerer