Indeed

In 2014, when Detroit found itself once again at a low point, the artist Corinne L. Rusch wandered through the city, her camera in hand. The city conjured up a special fascination in her. Cities flourished after industrialisation got underway in the early 19th century. However, some have experienced total decline, which the artist witnessed in Detroit. Rusch made her way through the desolate and almost abandoned city with her Polaroid Pathfinder 110 A, capturing the spooky mysticism of the silence and emptiness. The photographs are testimony to capitalism and its consequences. Single human figures can be recognised in some photos: individuals located in the backdrop of an era long gone, lost and forgotten. Rusch used Polaroid films that produce both a positive and a negative on paper. Her photographic documentation has been manipulated by artistic editing and changes to the material. This lends the photographs an air of found objects from a completely analogue era. In practice, the artist Corinne L. Rusch works in staged environments, and as such, the book also has a staged format. Rusch sees her artwork as a whole, conceptualised and directed by her like a film, where image, text and sound can come together and merge with one another. The publication comes with a vinyl record, the musical pieces on it understood as a kind of soundtrack. Michael Flury, in collaboration with Patrick Hollenstein and Alain C. Kupper, has produced an interstylistic music that commemorates Detroit/Détroit. Text fragments about Rusch’s works are contributed by Silvia Tschui, giving us an inner monologue that is dystopic and abstract – broken, perhaps even hopeful. The soundtrack is inspired on the one hand by Detroit’s music history, which had given us so many forms and genres, from Gospel and Jazz to Motown, Proto-Punk and HipHop, right up to Detroit Techno. On the other hand, it also provides references – in sound and space – to the world of images by Corinne L. Rusch and the narrative by Silvia Tschui.