Jay Black’s photographs of the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic mascots first caught my eye down at the W2 Culture + Media House in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. They are at once poignant and playful, and seemed to be a well thought out and cohesive effort to tell the story of the concerns people had about the Olympics using the plush toys. I interviewed him and discovered that really, the photos had been completely spontaneous, merely play done to fill time. Despite the protest-like nature of the photos, Jay also had a positive experience with the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
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.
Yuri Arajs, a Kelowna born artist who recently returned to Vancouver after a 30-year stint in Minneapolis, Minnesota, first heard about the Pivot Legal Society’s Red Tent campaign from his mother.
“I told myself I had to look it up,” explained Yuri in a conversation early Tuesday morning, just over a week in to Vancouver’s Olympic shenanigans which the Red Tent campaign was designed to correspond with.
The campaign centres around the use of red tents as symbols on the streets of Vancouver to draw attention to Canada’s homelessnesscrisis, allowing them to provide education to the public about the need for a funded national housing strategy and to pressure the government to take action on homelessness.
“So I read about the Red Tents, read about Pivot Legal, and started reading about the peole who work there… and those lawyers are rock stars,” Yuri stated. “They do great work, and for them to come up with the idea of this Red Tent campaign was absolutely inspiring.”
So inspiring that within four days of talking to his mom, Yuri had rented time at a screen printing studio and had already created the two colour prints that would become the basis of his art-meets-fundraising efforts to help raise money for the Red Tent campaign.
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.
Take a break from Olympic recaps on CTV Tuesday night and tune your radio to 90.1 CJSF (in the Vancouver area) or listen online at CJSF Campus/Community Radio, based out of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC, and Vancouver musician Adaline will be speaking with local artists who have been affected by homelessness as part of the International Homelessness Marathon / Canadian Homelessness Marathon. Those in the area can come to a live studio braodcast at the W2 Culture and Media House at 112 W Hastings from 8–10pm.
Running through the night, this 14-hour marathon is a collaboration of national community and campus radio programming featuring the voices and stories of homeless people in the United States and Canada.
The Homelessness Marathon was started in 1998 by Jeremy Weir Alderson, host of “The Nobody Show” which was then broadcast weekly on WEOS in Geneva, NY, as a result of the heartsickness he was feeling at the huge homelessness problem in New York City.
The Marathon took up force in Canada after being adopted by McGill University’s CKUT radio in 2004.
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.
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