The Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games have come to an end. Canada won more gold medals than any country ever in the history of the Winter Games. And yesterday, Canada took gold in men’s hockey in an electrifying game against the USA. A fitting end it seems to a two-week barn-burner of patriotism and national pride.
But the celebration has its darker side, one that few Olympic enthusiasts know about, or perhaps care to know about. For starters, in 2002 Vancouver residents voted in favour of a $3 billion Olympics that have subsequently mushroomed into a $7-8 billion bacchanalia of subsidies and debt. These “unexpected” costs have put unprecedented pressure on the provincial spending. Over the next two years, provincial funding for the arts will be cut by a staggering 88% – a devastating blow to cultural groups in British Columbia. School closures throughout the Lower Mainland reflect more of the pressure that has been brought to bare on provincial budgets. Add to these the ongoing crisis in homelessness and poverty in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side and the ways that Olympic enforcement ran roughshod over Constitutional rights of expression and assembly, and you have substantive fodder for a critical conversation about the Olympic Games.
If anything is making its slow way out of the Downtown East Side (DTES) and into mainstream Olympic news flows, it is the issue of homelessness. The Red Tent Campaign, the Tent City Squat on a VANOC parking lot, the homeless banner strung from the Cambie Bridge (for a VANOC sanctioned 20 minutes, and time immemorial photo-op), Saturday’s national housing rally …
This was the topic of conversation at last Sunday’s Safe Assembly Newscast at the VIVO studios. Safe Assembly is a gesture to protect the critical conversation about the Olympic games. Hosted by VIVO, a media arts collective who chose not to participate in the Cultural Olympiad, the Newscasts are opportunities for those critical of the Olympics to come together and reflect on the events of protest and dissent taking place in Vancouver.
What follows is a brief summary of the gathering — topics of discussion included the housing protest at the Vancouver Art Gallery last Saturday, update from the Tent City squat, a look at the growing phenomena of Olympic fans protesting against protesters, and the potential effects of university students as shock troops of gentrification in the DTES.
When local homeless and under-housed residents of the Downtown East Side (DTES) were asked what they wanted during the Vancouver Olympic games, they said a safe place to hang out, get some food and coffee, relax and listen to music. And they wanted this without the invasive scrutiny of the media and without feeling like they were a problem to be solved with charity. The Homeground Festival was born, a festival of sustenance and sanctuary specifically for those struggling with poverty, substance dependency, homelessness and physical and mental health challenges.
The dates of the festival are not publicized. The only way to find out about it is word of mouth or if you happen to see a poster which only appear in the DTES. And with one exception, media is not allowed on site – no cameras or recording devices of any kind. It is a place where DTES residents can go and feel comfortable among themselves without the invasive gaze of outsiders.
Art confounds so many of the problematics that come with the politics of power and poverty. Take the Hastings Folk Garden, for example. You can’t find it through the Cultural Olympiad. There are no Tourism BC pamphlets that tell you how to get there. You find it by walking around in Canada’s poorest neighbourhood, the Downtown East Side (DTES). In its own very quiet way, it defies the Olympic corporatization of public space and corresponding rendering of this beset community only in terms of a problem to be fixed.
The Downtown East Side is a neighbourhood that was not invited to the Olympic buffet — at least its residents weren’t. As the poorest community in Canada, the Olympic games are largely an unaffordable party that views their neighbourhood as a potential “public relations embarrassment” rather than vibrant albeit troubled home.
What was once an empty lot among the ruin of storefronts along the East Hastings corridor (a few steps from Insite, North America’s only safe injection site), is now a community garden owned by the Portland Hotel Society. And for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, the garden has been filled with art to create a little urban oasis with found objects and recycled materials.
The garden was created over the last 300 days largely by DTES resident Jim — who was unavailable to be interviewed on the day that I visited. I spoke briefly with Dominique, one of the artists who helped to make the art garden happen.
VIVO (the media arts group formerly known as Video In) surprised everyone by refusing Cultural Olympiad funding – not because of who they are, but because just about everyone else who was there at the time did take funding. And no surprise. The Cultural Olympiad handed out more than $20 million to local cultural and arts groups. Saying no to money is hard enough, even harder if you’re a cash strapped arts organization, which they all are.
But look what’s happened now. Gordon Campbell’s Liberals have announced the largest cuts to cultural spending in the history of the province. According to the Tyee, the Ministry of Tourism Arts and Culture, provincial funding for arts will fall a staggering 88 per cent over two years, from $19.5 million in 2008-’09 down to a vindictive $2.25 million in 2010-’11. Artists and arts organizations are understandably in shock, and the $20 million Olympic largess is starting to look not only like a cultural Trojan horse that will leave many arts groups facing questions of survivability, but also like a cynical plundering of the public purse for a two week party of Olympiads. There is a one helluva hangover coming, and British Columbia artists will be among the first to feel it.
Recognizing the complicated position that arts groups and artists participating in the Cultural Olympiad were in, VIVO has created a series of cultural events inviting the wider community to explore the dynamics of political dissent and public engagement in Vancouver and during the 2010 Olympics. One of them is [de]tour Vancouver 2010, a Google map of Vancouver’s history and present of civic engagement, artist groups and local progressive economies (see below), Another is Safe Assembly, two weeks of public conversation about resistance to and criticism of the Olympic machine.
In this report, I speak with Cheyanne Turions and Emilio Rojas from VIVO, two of the creators of the Safe Assembly programming at VIVO during the Winter games. They describe the creative thinking behind Safe Assembly, the programs and performances, collaboration with activists and artists in London (2012) and Sachi (2014) and what happened when Industry Canada representatives showed up at their studies wearing VANOC blazers to shut down their low-power radio broadcast of the news.
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