Detroit Detroit

Memory, Trauma and their Soundscapes

Zwei Personen stehen auf Dach, halten Schutzausrüstung, im Hintergrund Gebäude, Geländer und bewaldete Hügel unter Himmel.

Detroit, 2019: A car accident becomes the starting point for a performance that continually re-explores the experience. Somewhere between reality, video game, and the stage, the choreography and performance duo Montserrat Gardó Castillo & Petr Hastik explore processes of memory, using Grand Theft Auto as a virtual space for reenactment. In this interview, they discuss their fascination with this process, the role of nostalgia in their work, and their collaboration with sound artist Ted Gaier. “Detroit” will be performed three times at FFT: on Thursday, September 24, Friday, September 25, and Saturday, September 26, 2026, at 8 p.m. each night.

Detroit explores how memories change, are shared, and become intertwined with fiction. What is it about this process that interests you, and what was it like to revisit what happened again and again?

The starting point goes back to the research for our last work, The Fall of Sleep, when we began working with a neuroscience department. What surprised us most was how memory actually behaves. Memory turned out to be far less reliable than we assumed. It also works predictively, drawing on what has already happened to shape how we read the present and anticipate what comes next. And memory is perhaps less personal than we think. Especially now, it gets invaded by images and fictions that were never fully ours.
Detroit builds from that discovery, but what holds our attention just as much is the ontology of the accident itself: the way chaos interrupts a life that, a second earlier, still felt continuous. That sense of continuity is itself a construction, something memory and cognition assemble in real time. When it breaks, control disappears and meaning has to reorganize on the spot. We wanted to put that collapse in dialogue with video game logic: the reset, the constant negotiation of control between player and system.
For now we are avoiding to refer the crash itself. We are working through the context around it instead: the city, the systems, the archive, testing different reenactment methods without settling too quickly into one coherent, sedimented version of what happened.

Nostalgia and hauntology have been central themes in your previous productions. How do these ideas continue or evolve in Detroit?

Detroit is our most personal piece so far. Our previous works have gone through the ruins of the socialist dream, the mechanics of nostalgia, the impulse to exceed every limit, and the neuroscience of sleep and cognition. Detroit continues that, except now the starting point is a concrete event: a car accident. The car crash as a cultural object has its own lineage, from Ballard to accelerationism, a point where technology, velocity, and the body converge and fail simultaneously. Working with memory through that kind of event interests us precisely because it resists clean narration.
The city adds another layer. Detroit is perhaps the most literal case of hauntology available. Mark Fisher’s description of futures that were lost and keep haunting the present could have been written about this place specifically: the ruins of American capitalism, of an automobile industry that left the city behind, an architecture emptied out and still charged with what it once promised. We want to work at the intersection of those two things: memory of an event and memory of a place, both unreliable, both still producing effects.

For Detroit, you’re once again collaborating with Ted Gaier. What characterizes your creative partnership, and what kind of soundscapes have you developed together this time?

Ted’s role in Detroit is closer to a consultant than a composer. The musical concept is being developed with the musician Marcus Thomas. Our collaboration with Ted comes from friendship and from having worked together before, on our projects and in other contexts. What makes him irreplaceable for us is a combination that is rare: he knows music production and music history from the inside, and he thinks politically about both. Those two things never come apart in his work, and that is why it is really valuable for us.
For Detroit, we want to focus on techno and reclaim its origin as a Detroit sound. We are working with percussion and rhythmic structures, with sound production from materials, and with the technification and serialization of sound, processes that echo the assembly line logic the city was built on. We are also thinking about the concept of a soundtrack: what it means when music scores an event that already happened, and how that scoring changes what you think you remember.