![Vancouver [de]tour guide 2010](/wp-content/uploads/v2010map.png "Vancouver [de]tour guide 2010")
The $7 billion spectacle of the 2010 Winter Olympic games will attract a million or so visitors to Vancouver. Official hosts VANOC and the IOC want very much to shape the experiences of these vistors to fit the Olympic mould.
Alas, their efforts suggest a limited and limiting narrative: the silencing of all public criticism and dissent (the infamous “muzzle” clause in Cultural Olympiad performer contracts); a whitewashing of indigenous political and social realities; a faux social housing bureau to field questions from international reporters about homelessness; the ramped up merriment and festivities in the Downtown peninsula where Olympic revelry exhausts itself each night in a patriotic hurrah! of music and drink until 3 am.
Ahhhh, Vancouver, Canada’s very own happy land.
(See the video interview after the jump.)
There is, of course, the Vancouver that is already here with its very own histories and communities and artists and festivals and complex political realities. A Vancouver of public engagement, community organizing, democratic participation. A cityscape of cooperatively run small businesses, women’s shelters, safe injection sites, free food services, and needle exchanges. A Vancouver of aboriginal friendship centers, community radio stations, farmers markets, community gardens, lantern festivals, small theaters and media arts groups.
Using Google maps, a group of local artists have found a way to let visitors peek behind the IOC curtain and into the rich tapestry of cultural, political and creative pasts and present that is the Vancouver of the people who live here.
Althea Thauberger is one of a group of artists working at VIVO who put together the Vancouver [de]tour guide 2010, a fascinating use of Google maps to introduce all and sundry to the other Vancouver where people strive for community, speak their mind, resist abuses of authority and privilege and celebrate experiences other than the consumption. Join Althea as she guides us through the Vancouver [de]tour in this video.
- VIVO’s Safe Assembly program: Protecting public dissent during the 2010 Olympics
- Political art and the Cultural Olympiad
- An Olympic first: Independent media arts groups challenge IOC media monopoly
- Vancouver forces gallery to remove Anti-Olympic mural
- Art Garden on East Hastings: a refuge for the imagination
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
And if visitors from other provinces and countries want to find these venues then let them. I don't imagine that people who pay vast amounts of whatever currency they transact in, are also interested in checking out the plight of the less afluent, or whatever terminology poverty indulged people respectfully wished to be referred to. People are coming here to witness feats of daring do and have a grand old time. Not to have their sympathy bones tickled. Poor people aren't paying for the Olympics in the first place. Take a hike for once.
Poor people are, indeed, paying for the Olympics by suffering reduced government services, reduced opportunies, reduced health care and increased taxes. The rich aren' t paying for the Olympics. They get all the tax breaks so they have tons of disposable income. In fact, they are the only ones who could really afford to go to watch the entire games. We are our brothers' keepers, and no matter how much you try to put the blame on the poor for their poverty, we must help them and vote for governments who will strive for social and economic equality and environmental and economic sustainability.
Hi Please,
It's bold of you to want to speak for the million or so visitors coming to Vancouver, but spending time out and about at cultural and political events over the past few days I've seen too many Olympic visitors engage with interest and curiosity to think that they are only interested in officially sponsored experiences. I was filming a small "art garden" on East Hastings, today, an empty lot in the heart of the Downtown East Side filled with community garden plots and artwork. Many visitors – Olympic visitors with their passes hanging around their necks and Olympic scarves and hats on, etc. – were delighted by the garden and asked the garden's ambassador many many questions. At the housing rally today, as a small troop of marchers walked up Granville street all kinds of Olympic visitors were curious about what was going on, what the issues were, and were quite interested in the pamphlets being handed out. At the Gallery Centre A's Tea Party last night, visitors from many different countries drifted into the large gallery to have some tea and enjoy the performances. Just because people enjoy sports doesn't mean they stop being people.