It is hard to fully grasp the Heidelberg Project in Detroit unless you have experienced it firsthand. Even then, its appearance has likely changed because it is a work in constant progress, always evolving, always changing form. When you come across Tyree Guyton’s enormous, multifaceted piece of art, its scale and its ability to envelop everything around it—houses, trees, streets—will likely overwhelm you. It is made from discarded everyday items like stuffed animals, vacuum cleaners, shoes, and TVs; as well as various urban debris such as street signs, car hoods, and old window frames. It has been described as massive assemblage art, a one-man adaptive reuse project, an interactive sculpture park, and a thought-provoking example of outsider art.¹ The installation is a chaotic yet fascinating document of the legacy of urban blight in the city that has been spurred by a complex web of industry collapse, racial discrimination and poor government leadership.² Recent efforts to revitalise or gentrify (depending on who you ask) Detroit has almost exclusively focussed on the downtown and central core, the ‘gentrification alley’ and ignored the surrounding, historically African-American, communities that Guyton’s project reflects.

As one of Detroit's most celebrated and controversial public art installations, Guyton’s project has had impacts that extend beyond its sensory overload of colour, sound, and texture. As Jerry Herron states in Connecting the Dots: Tyree Guyton's Heidelberg Project, ‘what you see is not all of the project; the Heidelberg Project is more than the sum of its material parts’.³ The Heidelberg Project was initially driven by Tyree Guyton's ‘mission to change {his} environment through art and to tell… a story – my story, your story – about life and what I see in the world’.⁴ Since its inception in 1986 it has become recognised as a prominent example of place making ‘where meaningfulness is achieved through multiple objects, actions, and discourses as well as a physical space that exerts force on those discourses’.⁵ Since the late 1990s the project was incorporated and now encompasses a community of volunteers, employees, board members and funding organisations who continue to expand and adapt Guyton’s original vision.

Guyton’s early installations were a form of neighbourhood assemblage art that drew inspiration from street art (especially graffiti), African American folk art, object trouvé, and pop art. As a ‘repository of diverse and small-scale cultural productions’⁶ the Heidelberg Project progressively became a notable example of a city archive, a concept that Geraldine Pratt and Rose Marie San Juan highlight acts as,

sedimentation of the past that can be richly evocative of memory, and these memories can destabilise the present by giving uncanny inklings of other possible worlds that have existed and can be made to exist in the same space. Shared urban space can provide the means of developing and living – in concrete, material, mundane, routinised ways – shared collective memories; disruptions to and destruction of shared space can occasion and stimulate critical thought and action.⁷

A city archive operates in a much more haphazard environment than one would associate with a traditional archive. It is not static, exclusive or necessarily even curated. The city archive is composed of the ever changing, growing, decaying and destructive ecosystem of the city and the people who inhabit it; and is malleable to the ever-shifting performative nature and narratives of the cityscape. Guyton’s project not only challenges both the city and its residents to rethink the status quo and find innovative ways to transform the urban environment into a more sustainable and liveable space, it also emphasises, testifies to, and integrates specific neighbourhood histories into its bricolage. This includes the racially charged past marked by the destruction of homes during the 1967 race riots, the subsequent patterns of white flight and the municipal regulations that have arisen as Detroit progressively gentrifies.

Guyton’s project sharply contrasts with traditional archives, which often fail to adapt to the ever-changing dynamics of the city and its people. It is also distinguished from other community oriented archival projects such as Theaster Gates Stony Island Arts Bank as it integrates its material response to the environment and communities into its material morphology. In this way, the Heidelberg Project exemplifies the potential of a city archive—one that embodies Detroit's evolving identity and turbulent history, without resorting to the exploitative imagery often associated with the Detroit’s narrative. It continues to resist the gentrification that tends to emerge during cycles of urban renewal and presents a vision for how an artistic work expands an archive’s relationship with its local context and history.

The project is not a discrete installation, as it seeps out into the neighbourhood, absenting clear demarcation lines between itself and its surroundings with no entrance point, no visitor center, no way-finding materials, no suggested route, no exhibit labels or other didactic materials.⁸ Guyton’s installation of accrued refuse serves as a nexus, or node, that has drawn attention to the failure of politicians and city planners to sustain a liveable environment for Detroit's underprivileged citizens. As such, it invites visitors to enter and find personally and perhaps politically meaningful ways to navigate both its material manifestations and its conceptual, indeed spiritual, implications.

Additionally, another key aspect of the Heidelberg Project that differentiates it from urban renewal or heritage projects is reflected in the way Guyton ‘has not played by the rules.’⁹ He placed parts of the project on properties either owned by the city or abandoned due to unpaid taxes, properties the city also claimed ownership of.¹⁰ In the past the city of Detroit has argued that these are ‘unsanctioned creations… of questionable legality’ and described them as ‘artistic squatting’ on condemned properties.¹¹ This has led to the project’s constant vulnerability, always facing the threat of being dismantled. As a city archive, unlike a collection bound by the typical rules and limitations of conventional archives, it has incorporated these proprietary and economic issues into its ‘sedimentation’. As a porous and adaptive space that has weathered many challenges it has come to archive a community’s collective memory in the pursuit of benefiting the community it reflects.

The Heidelberg Project’s status as a city archive is emphasised by its official designation as a street subject to urban policies and municipal regulations. It does so by collecting, arranging, and displaying everyday items thrown out or abandoned by those who left the city in search for a better life, transforming and reframing the items from meaningless trash into meaningful remnants of a past that many would rather forget.¹² Guyton’s three-dimensional canvas includes the walls, roofs, porches, and yards of houses and lots, which serve as frames for exploring particular themes. Streets and sidewalks act as connective pathways between the lots, often transformed with vibrant polka dots and other aesthetic elements. Even trees create natural frames for discarded objects like shoes, stuffed animals, and shopping carts, further expanding the boundaries of what public art can be.

Guyton's project transposes originally transient objects, for instance toys, shoes, or television sets, into durable objects, (re)moving them from their discarded object-state (trash or rubbish) to the realm of regarded (or displayed) object-state. This transvaluation of the city’s refuse figuratively reflects the transformative capacity the project has had on the surrounding community, by providing visibility and agency in response to a city that appeared to have abandon them. Like many urban art projects, the Heidelberg Project's installations are only durable in a limited sense, being exposed to the weather and subject to razing by Detroit authorities and fires caused by an unknown arsonist, which have similarly been incorporated into the project’s mythology.

The Heidelberg Project is shaped by its surrounding neighborhood and the dynamics of city politics. It challenges being defined solely as art or as vandalism of a series of abandoned buildings. This defiance serves as a reminder of the original societal meanings attached to the objects and buildings—first as consumer goods, then as discarded waste—that Guyton reframes to challenge the economic value systems they reflect as a vision of community revitalisation. The concept of frames and the project’s transitory nature are key to understanding it as a city archive. While conventional collections and discrete urban art projects frequently become ideological arenas for cultural preservation and aesthetic canonisation, the Heidelberg Project's ‘frames’ emerge from and adapt to the urban landscape itself. It physically manifests across walls, roofs, porches, and yard spaces of individual houses and lots, which serve as frames to provoke the city and its residents to reconsider the status quo and search for different ways to remake itself. It also cultivates a community by emphasising the significant histories of its neighbourhood, including the racialised history of a city that has consistently discriminated against and let down its African-American constituents, through decades of racist policies and financial mismanagement. Guyton’s evocation of these histories stands in stark contrast to the ongoing gentrification of Detroit, which has progressively demolished large parts of the city that don’t conform to its urban renewal program.¹³ These acts of erasure reinforces the importance of the Heidelberg Project’s role as a city archive, one that continues to respond to and document the fluctuations of Detroit, encapsulating the shared histories of its communities.