Artists are fundamentally problem solvers. They are generally considered to solve problems of a personal and expressive nature, or perhaps community-related issues, and sometimes political or environmental issues. They are not often seen as the first line in solving, for example, the city’s infrastructure problems. But maybe they should be.
If you had asked Oren Goldenberg what he does ten years ago, he could have said “filmmaker” or “producer”, or he could have squinted and asked: who wants to know? Nowadays, however, the answer is a bit more complicated. At some point in the last decade, Goldenberg stopped making films as a document and crossed over to construct the world as a document. It’s not the first time he’s been tempted to do so. Our school (2005-2009) is a feature-length documentary that seeks to reveal the experience of attending high school for a day, from dawn to dusk, in his hometown of Detroit.
“When I was doing Our school, I think to myself, should I just become a teacher? What will really help with the education crisis? It’s going to be a teacher, right? said Goldenberg during an on-foot interview with Hyperallergic on the website of his latest company. Ten years ago, the grounds we walk on would have been identified by savvy Detroiters as Recycle here!a community waste collection center run by Matthew Naimi in a city that had suspended garbage collection for decades, let alone recycling. A lot has changed in ten years, and for seven years Goldenberg has been at the heart of it.
Today, Recycle here! is a recognized part of the city’s infrastructure, but the facilities surrounding it have undergone a surprising transformation. In place of the ruined outbuilding that once belonged to the old Lincoln car plant (still indicated by the adjoining Lincoln Street and its eponym art park, also developed by Naimi and its associates), a new complex is emerging. Once a free space and a favorite haunt of street performers, who tragically claimed at least one life, the whole is on the home stretch of the work which has made it possible to stabilize the structure and secure the installations. The project is set to launch this year with communal gathering spaces, a new venue for the longtime neighbor marble barand 81 direct work units calibrated to contain the community that occupied the old structure.
“While doing this project, I learned that our assumptions about development and construction are just plain wrong,” Goldenberg said. “When you think of high-end developments, they create a projection of who can we attract, as opposed to who is here, because they need something that could pay for the cost of renovating a historic building.”
“Nobody wants to be exclusive, or priced where it’s empty, but you have to create different verification models,” Goldenberg continued. “When we started making money here, people asked us: Why is your commercial rent so low? I said: Well, it’s for recycling here! They’re already there, it’s is all they can afford.
This is not the first time that Goldenberg has taken an interest in housing. Brewster Douglass, you are my brother (filmed in 2010-11, released in 2012) is a documentary about the first public housing for low-income Americans, erected in Detroit. A later work shifts from documentary to magical realism: Retrospective: A Requiem for Douglass (2015) is a compilation of seven commissioned rituals created and performed before, during and after the demolition of Detroit Brewster-Douglass housing project in the early 1990s.
In another past project, Goldenberg once again explored community development in a historic space. Although he created the video, “Make History: The Downtown Synagogue“Goldenberg’s most notable legacy with the organization is arguably the after-dark series House music dance partieswho sought to bring new energy and a wave of young voters to the Isaac Agree Downtown Synagoguebuilt in 1921 and currently the last remaining freestanding synagogue in Detroit.
Goldenberg followed the inspiration of the holidays as rallying points for the free community surrounding Lincoln Street Art Park, where the “Freak Beacon” serves as the Statue of Liberty, summoning the increasingly marginal part of Detroit that remains ungovernable. These people are the basis of the “characters” of Goldenberg’s current film, more than five years in the making and currently untitled, which seeks to capture the elusive answer to the question: what is Detroit?
“I think a lot of directors hold movies to be sacred and worth more than the humans who make them,” Goldenberg said. “I push really hard against that. I don’t think that’s true. Nobody should die making your movie, nobody should be burnt out and feel shitty for your movie. It is an illusion. But it’s different. People will live here.
In Detroit, the splintering of infrastructure, regulation and ownership has opened a window, which is rapidly closing as entrepreneurial forces seize the city as an opportunity for development. But for a minute, and maybe even a minute more, there are so many problems that artists were able to get their hands on and start solving the way artists do: a way that puts a completely different assessment on this. what does community mean, what is a recycling center, what is a building. Filmmakers and producers already know how to imagine a world, by the sheer power of belief. Goldenberg shows what happens when that belief becomes a home for others to occupy.
