Look out the window. Let your mind float and get lost. Where the city falls apart, there is a possibility for you to enter.
A street in Detroit appears. It might be 8 Mile. You see small plastic bags stuck in the naked trees. "This is a gritty, challenging place to live", says Steve. He is your driver.


Ride from Nowhere to Nowhere #1

Ride from Nowhere to Nowhere #2

Say nice things about Detroit. Strategies to keep hope. 
And where does this ride end?


Ride from Nowhere to Nowhere #3

The Northland Center was one of the first shopping malls
built in the US. Located on the border of the city of Detroit, it
opened in March 1954 and closed in March 2015. Visitors were
asked about their feelings concerning the closure, as well as
the current economic and social climate of Detroit.
This short audio documentary reveals the contradictions of
peoples’ feelings, moving between individualism and generosity,
everyday struggle and the American Dream, in a dramatically
unequal society.
You can listen to the interviews online, preferably with a mobile
phone, while wandering through a suburban mall somewhere in
Europe, for instance the mall found in Kista Centrum, a suburb
of Stockholm.

The end of the « Shopper’s Paradise »

Witness ?

1990 early summer / morning

-

I took the largest breath of air my lungs could hold, and held on to his arm as we went underneath the surface.

Everything changed from that point. The flippers on his feet moved his legs fast as a fish down towards the bottom. The water got cold as shivers on my back, and all the strings of noise from the other world was slowly inverted and faded away, blue became green and I lost my weight. In that moment of one breath I could just believe this was as real as the world above. 

It took me another year to learn how to swim above water, and several more to understand there is more then one Kairo.

-

2015 early summer / nigth 


An instrument of understanding, prompts to decipher a sound of ancient form of knowledge. 

The sounds of where we are, what is surrounding us and how we look upon the value reflected in an harbinger of anticipatory abstractions of things to come. 

In that moment of a breath the “vamp” holds the transition between surface and bottom preparing itself for the next chorus. In looped pause before and after the noise of beauty becomes the value of a life long romance of society. 

(Music for performance, Kairo, Upplands Väsby)

Performance here:
https://vimeo.com/126349245

Joel Englund 2015
www.joelenglund.com

Guide Book Stockholm