"Swan Song" Halima Afi Cassells + Shanna Merola, 2023, Room Project
“Swan Song” at Room Project elaborates on our initial exhibition launch last fall at MOCAD. In its new iteration we move from summer into autumn once again and invite you to join us for a closing ceremony on the equinox. The exhibition and event are held in collaboration with Cyrah Dardas and Our Craft of Care - a curatorial project uplifting artists whose practice includes restorative and regenerative art making, care work, and ritual.
"Solvent" Halima Afi Cassells + Shanna Merola, 2023, James and Grace Lee Boggs Center
“Solvent” invokes the world between memory, history, collective storytelling, and liberation at the water’s edge. Located inside the historic home of Civil Rights leaders James and Grace Lee Boggs which continues to serve as a catalyst for visionary organizing, movement building, and self-determining communities in the city of Detroit. In loving memory of Charity Hicks and Mama Lila Cabbil.
Detroit Resists is a coalition of activists, artists, architects, and community members working on behalf of an inclusive, equitable, and democratic city. We came together to respond to “The Architectural Imagination,” an exhibition at the 2016 Venice Biennale’s U.S. Pavilion. “The Architectural Imagination” appropriates contemporary Detroit as a place for “visionary American architectural practices” to develop “new speculative projects” with “far-reaching applications for cities around the world.” Detroit Resists understands the city differently. We know Detroit as a place where Afrikan, indigenous, and activist-art communities have been building resilience through culturally-literate design. Creating space for Detroiters historically and systematically omitted from conventional architecture’s imaginings. The digital occupation of the U.S. Pavilion uplifts the rich legacy of grassroots design-based activism in Detroit. This is resistance to mass water shutoffs, mass foreclosures, mass evictions, unconstrained gentrification, and other examples of spatial racism. These dynamics are playing out in cities across the globe in distinct but related ways; we invite you to join us in resistance.