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.
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.
Montreal artist Isabelle Hayeur was contacted by the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad about a year and a half ago, after curator Marlene Madison visited her studio in Montreal.
Her piece, Fire with Fire, is a three story tall video installation projected from the windows of Vancouver’s W2 culture + Media House at 112 West Hastings Street. The neighbourhood of choice is nationally known for being the poorest postal code in the country, plagued with a history of missing women and drug problems, and Hayeur’s work links both to the distant and recent troubles the area has faced.
“I was inspired by The Vancouver Great Fire that destroyed most of the newly incorporated city on 13 June 1886,” explained Hayeur. “I also refer to the architectural conditions of the neighbourhood since the late 80s—to its urban decay after the closure of the Woodward department store. The artwork was motivated as well by the human distress and the poverty of this ‘intense’ area of town.”
The Guardian has selected political artist Michael Rakowitz as their artist of the week. Although this American of Iraqi-Jewish heritage has drawn inspiration from sources as diverse as Arab newspapers and eBay, Guardian arts writer Skye Sherwin is drawn to Rakowitz’s constructive solutions to public problems, such as ParaSITE, his custom built homeless shelters.
Often he has devised practical, creative ways to get discussion going at ground level: public art projects that directly involve people. Begun in 2004, a project he called Return saw Rakowitz relaunch in Brooklyn a version of his grandfather’s import/export business; the local Iraqi community were invited to send items to Iraq for free, testing channels of communication at a time when there was almost no postal infrastructure. For another of Rakowitz’s projects, Enemy Kitchen (2006), cooking classes became a way to broach cultural boundaries, teaching school kids family recipes with the help of his mother in workshops staged in California and New York.
Rakowitz’s latest exhibition, The Worst Condition Is to Pass Under a Sword Which Is Not One’s Own, is at Tate Modern until May 3.
The Olympics are coming to Vancouver in just three weeks and almost no one I know is super thrilled about it. For some, it’s the traffic, for others, it’s the feeling that the only way we’ve been told to help is to “go on Vacation,” “take time off work,” “go to work earlier or later than usual to reduce traffic,” or “don’t drive your car.” It could also be that the City of Vancouver passed a by-law which prohibits the distribution of handbills in designated Olympic zones or lanes, and requires the removal of graffiti or posters that cause a “disturbance… with the enjoyment of entertainment on city land.”
For years leading to the Olympics, we’ve been seeing this “enjoyment disturbing” graffiti all over the city. (I actually quite enjoy them.)
So far, my best friend is the only exception to the city wide Olympic hate-on. It could be that her aunt is Olympic gold medalist Nancy Greene, or it could be that she and her family are generally excitable about winter sports. Truth be told, there is going to be some amazing things happening in Vancouver. If you happen to be in town, there will be some free visual art to look forward to thanks to the Cultural Olympiad, which will be running from January 22 to March 21.
Subscribe to Art Threat via RSS
Become a fan on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
