VIVO Media Arts members Alex Muir, Am Johal, and Cheyanne Turions are helping to organize special events taking place during the Olympics.

Credit: Doug Shanks

NEWS: VIVO prepares a different sort of Olympic activity

While the Cultural Olympiad’s program of international arts performances is seemingly as vast as the athletic proceedings of the 2010 Winter Games, VIVO Media Arts is a black sheep in a cultural landscape otherwise saturated with Olympic affiliations. Following a controversial decision in 2006 to refuse project funding from the Cultural Olympiad, VIVO’s studio, at 3rd and Main, will operate as an independent hub for artists and activists during the Olympics, consistent with VIVO’s 37-year-old mandate of providing a space for local artistic experimentation and collaboration.

Organized by a group of VIVO members as part of a collective called VIVO 2010: Safe Assembly, VIVO’s Games-time activities will take the form of lecture and presentation series, broadcasts from a radio station designed by and for VIVO during the Games, and other artistic projects that members hope will contribute to a multi-media archive of local responses to the Olympics.

“We felt that [not participating in the Cultural Olympiad] would put us in a strong position to be able to critically look at what’s happening in the city: what’s going on with the Olympics, where mistakes are being made, where good things might be happening, and not having to be looking over our shoulder,” VIVO general manager Emma Hendrix says of the decision to refuse funding from the Cultural Olympiad. Hendrix acknowledges the decision was difficult, given that most arts organizations, including VIVO, operate on a limited budget and typically welcome financial assistance.

However, the need for Safe Assembly members to designate a space in which to produce creative responses to the Olympics — whether they take the form of broadcast media, visual arts, multi-media presentations, or lectures — became more important than funding.

One of the products of this decision will be the VIVO Afternoon School, co-presented with the Cineworks Independent Filmmakers Society. Taking place on weekdays during the Olympics from 2 to 4 p.m., the Afternoon School will be made up of lectures, reading groups, film screenings from VIVO’s media archives, and interactive discussions, all of which are free and encouraging of public participation. “There wasn’t really an opportunity for [critical] response [to the Olympics] in Beijing in the same way that there’s an opportunity for response here,” says Cheyanne Turions, one of the Afternoon School’s programmers.

Among other pursuits, the Afternoon School will explore ideas of nationalism within the context of the Olympics, media representation of host cities, and the racialization of the Games.

Safe Assembly member Nicholas Perrin will coordinate a nighttime presentation series at VIVO called the Evening News, the first sessions of which will start on February 13 and 15 at 7 p.m. “It’s trying to facilitate a conversation or perform a kind of coalition-building around what the Olympics mean for our community,” Perrin says.

The Evening News, Perrin says, will operate as an open space for people to critically discuss the events of the Games. The program will take the form of presentations by local activists, as well as viewings of independent video footage and photographic materials collected during the Games. “It’s important for the community that this happens,” he says. “It’s important that we document it and get an archive.”

Archives generated through VIVO during the 2010 Games will be passed on to future Olympic host cities in the hope that what happens during Vancouver’s Olympics will be looked upon critically in the future.

More information on VIVO’s Olympic activity will be available on its website, VideoInStudios.com.