Thursday, July 18 – Sunday, July 21, 2013
citydrift/Detroit will begin with a 72 hour event consisting of 2 days of drifts that culminate into 1 – 2 days of creation and installation of drift documentation or ephemera, followed by a day of panel discussions at the citydrift/Detroit hub(s). citydrift/Detroit will conclude with an exhibition of the installed drift documentation at Kunsthalle Detroit until mid-August, 2013. citydrift/Detroit participants will include Detroit Metro area artists, musicians, poets, curators, and gallerists, as well as artists, musicians, poets, curators, gallerists and participants from citydrift/Bushwick.
citydrift is a meta-event qua group installation/art discourse composed loosely in different measures on Guy Debord’s Situationist concept of the dérive or drift, Jan Hoet’s 1986 project in Ghent, Chambres D’Amis, and Colin DeLand’s playful reconfiguration of art fair paradigms with his “Gramercy Hotel” model.
citydrift is designed as something that can be reproduced in some variant fashion in different cities over time. The first edition of citydrift, citydrift/Bushwick took place in Brooklyn, New York in September 2012 and involved over 12 non-profit and commercial art galleries with over 200 participants. The second edition of citydrift will be held in Detroit summer 2013.
citydrift is not exactly an exhibition, nor strictly speaking simply an art event, rather the concept is to be understood as a collective enterprise that brings together various strains of non-traditional art practices, organized under the operative philosophical umbrella of the drift. The result is a walking exploration of the environment, outside of any normative understanding of movement (traveling to work, shop, appointments…). It is an attempt to reclaim, if only briefly, a place for art outside the universal sphere of commerce.
The purpose of citydrift is not to claim some hidden knowledge of a city, but to ‘tease’ out newer understandings using all possible modalities, and viewpoints from both inside the art culture of a place, as well as those working in similar fashion outside of that place.