Border Blast!

2018, 2019

Building off the research begun in our 2015 Porous Borders Festival, The Hinterlands and friends take a gander again at the borders running through our community. In a celebration nicknamed the Border Blast! 1 we held puppet dispatches from across the Hamtramck/Detroit border to answer our deepest and shallowest questions about what goes on along this bizarre border, brought viewers through a live-streamed two-bike bike ride along the entire border, crowd-sourced trophies for our favorite border businesses, and held the Take Out Take Down, a timed race between Aladdin and Reshmi, two of our favorite Bengali restaurants on either side of the border.

For Border Blast 2, we explored how the neighborhood connected in across the world, in a series of digitally connected experiments high and low brow, including: a binational psycho-geographic stroll connecting Hamtramck’s resident wanderer Walter Wasacz to Moscow philosophers Oleg Aronson and Helene Petrovsky; a bedtime story linking Discount Mattress on Conant Street to a Beijing architecture studio; a workshop to crowd-source historical markers with Bangla typography research Maisha Qurashi; a disembodied two-part lecture with visual artist Zahra Moein in Mälmo, Sweden; and round two of the Take Out Take Down with two more favorite Bengali joints on the border, Zamzam and Modhuban Sweets.

Border Blast! 1: with Richard Newman, Liza Bielby, Shoshanna Utchenik, Norma Jean Haynes, Scott Crandall, Maddy Rager, Maddie Etzcorn, Dave Sanders and guests at Aladdin, Reshmi, Hello Shwarma!, Hamtramck Historical Museum, and more. With funds from the NEA Artworks Program and the Peck Foundation.

Border Blast 2: with Richard Newman, Liza Bielby, Renee Willoughby, Walter Wasacz, Jonathan Flatley/Agnes/Cricket, Oleg Aronson, Helena Petrovsky, Maisha Quraishi, Billy Mark, Shen Bolun, TGIS, Zahra Moein, Dave Sanders, Maddy Rager, Scott Crandall, the excellent staff of Zamzam and Modhuban Sweets, and more. With funds from AXD Festival, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation