Please join us for a virtual panel discussion to launch the exhibit, Visualizing Translation: Homeland and Heimat in Detroit and Dortmund (on view October- November 2021 at the downtown branch of the Ann Arbor District Library).

The panel will engage artists Theon Delgado Sr. (Southwest Detroit) and Peyman Azhari (Cologne, Germany) in conversation about their work. The discussion will be moderated by Kristin Dickinson (UM Department of German) and Alan Chin (Columbia Journalism School, photographer, and co-founder of Facing Change: Documenting Detroit)

The exhibit showcases photographs from Delgado’s collection 3 Miles Thru Southwest, which highlights the diversity of Detroit’s vibrant Mexicantown. These will be displayed alongside images from Azhari’s Heimat 132, which documents residents of 132 different nationalities living in the northern district of Dortmund. Shedding light on each neighborhood’s histories of migration, the exhibit offers an intimate look at immigrant-owned businesses; multilingual signage; and striking images of graffiti, street art, and other forms of visual creative expression.

At the center of the exhibit is a series of portraits accompanied by brief narratives of home and migration, which visitors may listen to in English, Spanish, or German via QR codes. In addition to detailing the complex and often perilous routes that brought many residents to southwest Detroit and northern Dortmund, these narratives also grapple with two key terms: Heimat and homeland. Taken together, these photographs and narratives prompt us to consider the many meanings of home and homeland from a multilingual perspective.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature, the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, the U-M Institute for the Humanities, the Ann Arbor District Library, and the 2021-22 Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Sites of Translation in the Multilingual Midwest.