On July 15th, Next City will be screening Freshwater an experimental video short written and directed by the artist dream hampton. A meditation on Detroit–Freshwater unveils the fluid nature of memory in familial and geographical legacies. In this exhibition, hampton explores the duality of water as a force of both harmony and devastation.

Freshwater is a narrated tale of remembrance, flooding basements, and maintaining connections in the wake of climate catastrophe.

Freshwater Q & A with prominent activist and community advocate Bryce Detroit and Next City's Equitable Cities Reporting Fellow for Anti-Displacement Strategies Eliana Perozo

Prominent Activist and Community Advocate: Bryce Detroit is the multimodal Afrofuturist griot, artist, activist, cultural architect, and pioneer of Entertainment Justice. As a national award-winning music producer and performance artist, Bryce Detroit utilizes his social practice to demonstrate the power of music entertainment, sociocultural iconography, and native legacies to preserve, produce, and promote new Diasporic Afrikan narratives, cultural literacies, and regenerative neighborhood-based “hyperlocal-to-global” economies.

Bryce Detroit is a 2025 CONTAINER artist-in-residence, 2024 Institute for AfroUrbanism fellow, a 2023 Planetary Self artist-in-residence, a 2020 Harvard University Council of the Arts award recipient, 2019 New Museum Ideas Cities Fellow, a 2018 Race Forward - Rinku Sen Innovation Awardee, as well as a 2017 Knight Arts Challenge award winner. Bryce Detroit was also selected as music curator for the 10th St Etienne International Design Biennale, representing Detroit as a UNESCO City of Design, to become the first music curator in the Biennale’s twenty-year history.

A prominent activist and community advocate, Bryce Detroit grows intersectional self-determined communities as a founding member of Oakland Avenue Artists Coalition, founding organizer of Detroit Community Wealth Fund, consultant at Center for Community Based Enterprises (C2BE), board member for East Michigan Environmental Action Council, and founding member of the art-activism collective Frontline Detroit.

Moderator: Eliana Perozo is an engagement reporter and political educator based in New York City. She’s covered social services, education, New York’s migrant crisis, criminal justice, public health and more. Before transitioning into engagement journalism, Eliana spent nearly 10 years working in movement spaces as an organizer and policy expert. She is an Ida B. Wells Scholar from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and holds an M.A. in engagement journalism. Her work has been featured on This American Life.