SVES Event Documentation

Safe Assembly

About

Location: VIVO Media Arts Centre, 1965 Main Street, Vancouver.
Dates: February 15-27, 2010

Safe Assembly was a series of events and actions in opposition to the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver. Programmed by the White Pillows Collective: Patrick Cruz, Francis Cruz, Chun Hua Catherine Dong, Francisco Fernando-Granados, Penelope Hetherington, Manolo Lugo, Heidi Nagtegaal, Alexandra Phillips, Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa, Emilio Rojas, Ikbal Singh.

2010 Web Presence

VIVO 2010: Safe Assembly
Since 1973, VIVO Media Arts Centre (aka Satellite Video Exchange Society, aka Video In), has provided a space for diverse dialogues, artistic experimentation and the freedom to respond. In keeping with our history, VIVO chose not to seek support through the 2010 Cultural Olympiad. As a hub for analysis, skill sharing, production, and collaboration, VIVO invites artists to consider their production in relation to the events and systems around them.

Afternoon School consists of both planned and spontaneous seminars, with examples of skill sharing, media activism, screenings from the Video Out archive with its rich history of protest in Vancouver, and discussions using critical theory and contemporary art to produce a counter-public.

The Evening News is a series of discussions and presentations that will include a forum for participants and audience members to show highlights and ephemera from what they have gathered throughout the day. These presentations will contribute to a larger conversation and archive around the cultural meaning and social impact of the Olympics.

We will be operating a radio transmitter during the last two weeks of February. Our signal will also be streaming online. Our range will be humble, and thus situated.

Social Propaganda Mixing Machine is an open call for participants to create sound or image propaganda.

We will be hosting the Vancouver (de)Tour Guide 2010 project in our front space.

Covering Up will be a street action photo/video-documentation project.

Safe Facade also beams from our front.

We also invite people to collaborate with our performance troupe, The White Pillows, to create responses to the day-to-day tensions of the event and site-specific performances that deal with public presence.

VIVO 2010: Safe Assembly intends to facilitate cultural expressions that arise from the community in a lineage of solidarity. If you are interested in participating please come visit us this month.

Media Documentation

Podcasts

Short Range Poetic Device
Safe Assembly: Poetry and poetics streaming against the Olympic Industrial Complex

SRPD1 16 Feb 2010 Length: 01:05:00 Stephen Collis, Roger Farr, Donato Mancin
SRPD2 17 Feb 2010 Length: 01:22:09 Stephen Collis, Jeff Derksen, Kim Duff, Roger Farr, Reg Johanson
SRPD3 23 Feb 2010 Length: 00:34:37 Clint Burnham, Stephen Collis, Roger Farr, Rita Wong
SRPD4 24 Feb 2010 Length: 01:42:21 Stephen Collis, Roger Farr, Cecily Nicholson, Naava Smolash

These podcasts and more about this project are still accessible at http://shortrangepoeticdevice.blogspot.com
This series were also archived at Radio4All.net.

License: Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike (by-nc-sa)

Video Documentation

Restricted due to privacy concerns. Researchers should reach out to the Archive Manager to discuss conditions for access. Please email us at library@vivomediaarts.com.

AFTERNOON SCHOOL (Original Web Presence)

PRESENTED AS PART OF SAFE ASSEMBLY 2010

Afternoon School consists of both planned and spontaneous seminars, with examples of skill sharing, media activism, screenings from the Video Out archive with its rich history of protest in Vancouver, and discussions using critical theory and contemporary art to produce a counter-public. Curated by cheyanne turions and Lois Klassen. Co-presented with Cineworks.

Monday, 15 February 2010, 2pm
SCREENING THE OLYMPIC CITY: VANCOUVER 2010 AND DOCUMENTARY PRACTICE
presented by Angela Piccini

Downtown Eastside, Four Host First Nations, developer dreams, “the best place on earth.” Screen practices produce specific experiences of Vancouver as an Olympic City. They present the city as material, yet it is a city performed by particular affective presences and haunting absences. In this lecture I will discuss current research that investigates the multiple Vancouvers in play across screens in the run-up to the 2010 Vancouver/Whistler Winter Olympic Games.

My investigation responds to the history of the modern Olympic Games, which have relied heavily on entanglements between antiquity and urban modernity made possible through the use of camera-based technologies. German excavations at Olympia were reopened in preparation for the 1936 Berlin Olympics and archaeology became the ground upon which fascist Aryan bodily aesthetics were constructed, enacted and celebrated in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938). The Olympic torch relay in China began its final approach to Beijing from Zhoukoudian, a UNESCO heritage site famous for its Peking Man, while film director Zhang Yimou’s Beijing opening and closing ceremonies expressed his trademark heritage-cinema aesthetic. Between Berlin and Beijing, Olympic Games organizers have worked with filmmakers to harness the material heritage of the nation to market the mega-event through documentary practices. These bring the archaeological imaginations of the nation state into the urban spaces of Olympic host cities, performatively spatializing global and local, nationalist and multi-national neoliberal, past and present.

To what extent is this played out in Vancouver? The 2010 Vancouver/Whistler Olympic Games presents the city at a time of economic and political flux. Documentary filmmakers have largely been excluded from funding strands as the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee has commissioned screenworks within either corporate promotional or visual arts contexts or has focused on user-generated content through the Canada CODE initiative. Tracing examples that blur distinctions between documentary and experimental practices, I will explore the moving image aesthetics of an Olympic city to consider the present absence of the material past and the city’s fear of remembering.

ANGELA PICCINI is a Lecturer in Screen Studies and Head of Education in Drama: Theatre, Film, Television at University of Bristol. Her work investigates place and visual culture and the dialogue between fact and fiction produced by the documentary impulse. Specifically, she continues to be interested in the ways in which the materialized traces of the past circulate through contemporary and historic screen practices.

Tuesday, 16 February 2010, 2pm
REACT2010
presented by Jennifer Pickering + participating artists

The Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, based in Kelowna BC, is engaging artists and the global community in a creative cultural conversation about the values surrounding the Olympics. REACT2010.com is a dynamic medium for creative expression that will lead to an examination and appreciation of diverse cultural values. Utilizing mediums of choice, the Alternator has invited artists to react to the values they see expressed in the Olympic Games. REACT2010.com will provide a platform to display their art-based responses to the world.

JENNIFER PICKERING is the director of the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art.

BRACKEN H’ANUSE CORLETT is a multimedia/mixed-media/mixed-blood artist hailing from the Wuikinuxv and Klahoose Nations. He works in film/video, sound and performance as well as traditional and contemporary visual art. He has worked for Redwire Native Youth Media as a writer and is a graduate of the En’owkin Centre. He also volunteers for the Ullus Collective, a media arts group in the Okanagan. The focus of his work is cultural reclamation, rebirth and decolonization. He hopes to pass on what he has learned to the next generation.

JEREMY OWEN TURNER lives in Vancouver where he is pursuing a Masters of Interactive Arts at Simon Fraser University. Turner is a performance artist, curator, theorist and music composer in virtual worlds. In 2006, he co-founded Second Front in Second Life and was also curator of the Second Live exhibition as part of the LIVE 2007 Biennial of Performance Art in Vancouver.

JUDY CHEUNG received her undergraduate visual arts degree from the University of Calgary and an MFA degree from the Pratt Institute, New York. Cheung’s work has been exhibited across Canada, USA, Europe, as well as in Hong Kong and Singapore. In 2006 her on-going project, “Love is in the Air- SkyLink” was shown at the Havana Biennial in Cuba, and her solo exhibition, freeLink, was staged at the Surrey Art Gallery. Cheung currently lives in Vancouver.

Video is at the core of BRIAN GOTRO’s practice. His single-channel tapes and installation works activate qualities of the ephemeral, comedic, social and political. Turning the camera on his self and those around him Gotro engages in both critique and examination of portrait and surrounding.

JAMES MASZ is a re-emerging multi-disciplinary artist and electronic musician currently residing in Vancouver.

Wednesday, 17 February 2010, 2pm
HOST CITY
presented by Heather Cosidetto and Stefan Morales

Heather Cosidetto and Stefan Morales will explore the meaning of the “host city.” The city of Vancouver hosts its ever-present and ever-changing guests in ways that house a handful here, a handful there, but never all and every one. How might a discursive shift from analysis preoccupied with the man made world (e.g. social, political, cultural) to one where biological and ecological themes reign predominant, enable a more intimate understanding of the relationships between guests and hosts? Expanding the question to include the region that Vancouver finds itself within, they ask: in what ways does the host city behave as a guest in its wider environs?

HEATHER COSIDETTO is an artist, writer and educator based in BC. She holds a BFA in Integrated Media from Emily Carr and an MA in Culture, Science, and Technology from Goldsmiths University in London. She has recently returned from a stint in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley, where she was Program Director at Ross Creek Centre for the Arts. Her current research is on the representation of food and farming.

STEFAN MORALES holds a BA in Political Science from the University of Victoria, and is currently working towards completion of his Master’s Degree in Political Science from Acadia University, NS. His current research focuses on the scientific, political and cultural intrications of the soil food web.

Wednesday, 17 February 2010, 4pm
INDIGENOUS WOMEN RESISTING
presented by Cherry Smiley

A discussion about prostitution, colonization, and Indigenous women before, during, and after the Olympic games.

CHERRY SMILEY is an abolitionist, activist and feminist. She is a collective member of the Aboriginal Women’s Action Network, an organization that is an independent voice against injustice to Aboriginal women. AWAN began in November 1995 as a result of concerns about the hierarchical and patriarchal power structures which can serve to silence Aboriginal women. Most recently, AWAN has taken a stand against the total decriminalization or legalization of prostitution.

Thursday, 18 February 2010, 2pm
THOUGHT ON FILM XXV
presented by cheyanne turions

A monthly reading + discussion group, Thought on Film aims to promote critical thought around film product and practice through community-based discussion. Open to the public, Thought on Film fosters the close reading of texts confronting issues in contemporary, cutting-edge cinematic practice and philosophy.

As part of Safe Assembly’s Afternoon School program, February’s meeting will feature the Graham McFee and Alan Tomlison’s essay “Riefenstahl’s Olympia: Ideology and Aesthetics in the Shaping of the Aryan Athletic Body,” originally published in 1999 in the International Journal of the History of Sport.

Using as texts Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia films, and related aspects of Triumph of the Will, McFee and Tomlinson explore how forms of representation, which record and relay historical moments, are retrospectively understood on the basis of a mixture of deference and irreverence, and judged in terms of particular political or aesthetic dynamics. Considering the fact that Riefenstahl’s films were made as part of the Nazi propaganda machine yet function as important moments in the history of cinema, Thought on Film will examine how political mechanisms can function in art works and vice versa. Contemplating the retrospective evaluation of Riefenstahl’s films as documents of the 1936 Summer Olympics, we will imagine a speculative history of this, Vancouver’s Winter Olympic moment, through the artistic responses that are just now taking shape.

CHEYANNE TURIONS is the Programs Manager + Curator at Cineworks Independent Filmmakers Society.

Friday, 19 February 2010, 2pm
COOL RUNNINGS: THE DISNEYIFICATION AND RACIALIZATION OF THE WINTER GAMES
presented by Kevin M. Rowe

The film Cool Runnings provides an ample example of the process of the Disneyfication of the real life dramas that unfold during international sporting events such as the 1988 Olympics in Calgary Alberta where a Jamaican bobsleigh team made its debut. This film, while both softening and over dramatizing the actual events, espouses the mythologies of “blackness” through a process of producing and reproducing the black body and mind. This lecture will draw on sources from history, geography, anthropology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, linguistics and cultural studies to discuss the “whitening” of the Winter Games.

Starting with a discussion of the film Cool Runnings this lecture will problematize the general notions of race, and race in sport. We will then look at how Disneyfication comes into play in the spread of these black myths, instigating a discussion of the racialization of the present Winter Games by questioning issues such as the promotion of diaspora and multiculturalism within the Games themselves. The aim is to keep ajar the critical discourses of race and sport up to and including what Rowe will call an Olympic cultural imperialism that is based on a racist and hierarchical trialectic of the Occidental over the Oriental and Meridional.

KEVIN M. ROWE was born in Calgary Alberta where he spent much of his time consorting with all the right and wrong types. He left Calgary after graduating from an alternative high school and thought to come coastward to try his hand at film. Film and Kevin did not make swell bedfellows. Later under threat, or it could have been a bet, from a partner in love, he decided again to attend College. He found himself studying in geography, an addict of space. Graduating in 2009 with a B.A. in geography from Simon Fraser University and several years experience in community development as the coordinator for the Community Access Program Youth Initiative he found himself looking forward to continuing his studies in geography. His main interests are with geophilosophy, violence and space, gender and space, Marxist and radical geographies, and in anarchism. He also likes to play football (soccer) and ride bicycles.

Monday, 22 February 2010, 2pm
FRAGMENTED GEOGRAPHIES
presented by Natalie Ethier

Fragmented Geographies will explore psychogeography, dérive/drift, and the right to the city to raise questions around contested spaces, constructed landscapes and temporal infrastructure created by and for Vancouver 2010. Participants will be invited to create memory maps of the city, tracing their routes through it to show how mobility is affected by the current global spectacle. At the end, instructions on how to conduct a dérive through the city will be given.

A geographer and advocate for pedestrian-scale development, NATALIE ETHIER is interested in the connections between urban form, perception, and experience of place, and how these influence movement through cities. With her project Pedestrian City she encourages people to share memory maps as a way to make connections between the places and interactions they experience in a neighbourhood; things they’ve noticed but maybe never put together in the same mental space.

Tuesday, 23 February 2010, 2pm
THE APPEARANCE OF ACTIVISM
presented by Rob Stone

“An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory” -Friedrich Engels

Quite what was meant by Engels with his famous sentence? During this lab session we will think about differing practices of activism and the political realm for art. Looking first at examples from Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, Britain and Germany in the 1930s we will consider the ways that the poetics of political organization and gesture were rethought and refined by movements in the mid-1960s to mid-1970s. We will consider the figured activity of the contemporary activist. And ask: What are the roles of structure and disguise in this? How do allusion, mockery and earnestness function? What is the role of the witness participant? Need the activist be responsible?

Recently theories of art practice have focused on the ways that unwarranted, even eccentric sociabilities have occupied the centre stage for many forms of art process during the past decade. We will talk about the role art has taken in shaping collectivity, and explore the powerful productiveness of fallibility.

ROB STONE is Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Art at Middlesex University and Adjunct Professor with the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia. His current research interests are in sound, architecture and the aesthetics of modern sociability. He has published widely exploring and theorizing these and other areas of at practice and cultural sensibility. His book Auditions: Architecture and Aurality is soon to be published by MIT Press.

Wednesday, 24 February 2010, 2pm
STRUCTURE OF RELIEF: ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ART AND ETHICS
presented by Kristina Lee Podesva

Structure of Relief departs from a paper and artwork presented by Podesva at “Speaking Truth to Reconciliation” (Artspeak, 2009). For this session, she will consider the ethical, political, and aesthetic by examining the who, the what, and the how of art, ultimately inviting participants to articulate and puzzle through the relationship between art and ethics.

KRISTINA LEE PODESVA is a Vancouver-based artist, writer, and editor of Fillip. She was the founder of colourschool, a free school dedicated to the speculative and collaborative research of five colours; white, black, red, yellow, and brown, and was the inaugural artist in residence at the Langara Centre for Art in Public Spaces. Her work and texts have appeared in exhibitions, screenings, and projects in Canada, the United States, and Europe.

Wednesday, 24 February 2010, 4pm
LIFE INSIDE THE PLEASURE DOME: OLYMPISM, TOURISM AND THE FUTURE OF VANCOUVER
presented by Max Fawcett

While Team Canada’s athletes may have their collective eyes set on winning gold, the ambitions of the politicians, business leaders, games officials, and other interests aligned behind the 2010 Winter Olympics are focused squarely on a different kind of gold. The games, they hope, will introduce Vancouver to the rest of the world, with television personalities like NBC’s Matt Lauer playing the role of the trustworthy chaperone. That introduction, meanwhile, will lead to a lucrative long-term relationship between international visitors, investors, and the city of Vancouver’s tourism industry.

Two weeks of fawning coverage of our city’s natural beauty, first-class restaurants, and other tourist-friendly amenities by the assembled members of the international press would be a winning performance for Olympic organizers and the business interests that have underwritten their efforts, although the absence of snow on the local mountains, a forecast full of unrelenting dreariness, and a noticeably agitated local population may yet prevent that dream from being realized. Yet even if the weather, the snow-making machines, and the locals co-operate long enough to allow VANOC’s massive public relations machine to do its job, the benefits that might result from their efforts will flow far more naturally in the direction of the city’s corporate interests rather than that of the millions of people who actually have to make a life and a living in Vancouver.

After all, while a post-Olympic boom in Vancouver’s already bustling tourist industry might be good news in the short-term, its effect on the longer-term view is decidedly less rosy. A further expansion of Vancouver’s already bloated tourism and service industries would mark an acceleration of the transformation that has been afoot in Vancouver since Expo ’86, one that has seen the city aggressively re-brand itself as a “world-class tourist destination.” If that transformative process continues, the traces that still remain, both physically and culturally, of Vancouver’s history as a functioning (and functional) city will slip still further into our collective rear-view mirror.

In their place are the foundations for a reinvention of the city as a pleasure-dome, a recreational venue for the world’s rich and famous like the one that Fritz Lang portrayed over eighty years ago in his 1927 silent film Metropolis. Lang’s film and the messages contained within it will be used to illuminate the risks associated with this aggressive re-imagination of the city of Vancouver. Will Vancouver finally return to the difficult work of creating a meaningful local economy that is capable of producing real jobs that pay real incomes, or will it continue its metamorphosis into an international playground for the rich and famous? Will it be a city where those without access to trust funds or winning lottery tickets can afford to buy a home and maintain a reasonable standard of living, or one where locals are pushed inexorably to the city’s economic, cultural, and even physical periphery? These are questions that desperately need to be asked, and soon, before it’s too late.

MAX FAWCETT is a freelance journalist, itinerant blogger, aspiring polemicist, and most recently the editor of the Chetwynd Echo, a weekly newspaper serving the small northern B.C. community of Chetwynd. His latest musings and links to previously published work can be found at www.maxfawcett.com.

Thursday, 25 February 2010, 2pm
HABITAT ISLAND AND OTHER SITES FOR DISRUPTION
presented by Holly Schmidt

Holly Schmidt will explore the potentially transformative power of art interventions in the built environment in relation to the South East False Creek/Olympic Village development.

She will explore the recent development of South East False Creek through the work of Vancouver writer and critic, Derek Simons. Using his examination of interstitial spaces and the contingency of present day development as a point of departure to explore concepts of democracy, plurality and public space as presented by art theorist Rosalyn Deutsche. She emphasizes that how we understand and visualize public space is related to how we understand the social and political relations among people. Schmidt will introduce a range of intervention works that highlight the potential role artists can play when intervening into public spaces such as South East False Creek/Olympic Village.

HOLLY SCHMIDT is a media arts candidate in the Masters of Applied Arts program at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. In recent years she worked collaboratively with computer scientist, Uta Hinrichs in the Interactions Lab at the University of Calgary to create interactive touch table installations. These works are part of a broader orientation towards transdisciplinary research-based collaborations that explore emergence and uncertainty in human and nonhuman relations. She has exhibited and presented nationally and internationally at the Tangible and Embedded Interaction 2010 Conference at M.I.T, Cambridge, the Glenbow Museum, Calgary, the 2007 Computational Aesthetics Conference, Banff Centre, the Visningrommet, Bergen, Norway and MAD Emergent Art Centre, Eindhoven, Netherlands.

Thursday, 25 February 2010, 4pm
FREDERICK WISEMAN’S ASPEN
presented by Donato Mancini

Aspen is a film about a town famous in the 19th century for silver mining and now known for its scenic splendor, mountains, skiing, hiking, music, intellectual activity and fashionable people. The film documents the daily life and activities of the people who live, work, visit and play in Aspen in the winter. Aspen is topical for an Olympics-besieged city, as it is about the highly elite skiing resort of Aspen. An amazing, revealing, et cetera (adjectives agglutinate….) montage of millionaires at play that makes starkly visible the class character of winter sports. If ever they were in doubt. Mancini will introduce the film screening and the audience is encouraged to stay for discussion and analysis of the film to follow.

DONATO MANCINI is a Toronto-born, Hamilton-raised, and Vancouver based-resident who performs as a writer, visual artist and polymath.

Friday, 26 February 2010, 2pm
NATIONALISM: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY
presented by Lisa Baroldi

War, discrimination, racism, genocide, and the rise of the Far-Right are products of nationalism–the bad and the ugly kind. Can nationalism produce good? Malcolm X equated nationalism to freedom from the grip of an oppressive hegemony and rallied a Black Nation in the Sixties. Québeckers hit the streets to celebrate when Prime Minister Stephen Harper recognized Québec as a Nation, and opposition leaders followed suite (with conditions). I, along with millions of others, wore red and white to cheer on Canadians as they ran the Olympic torch. Good? Is it ever good to create the “other” in defining self, in feeling unified, in making change? Can it be avoided? Join me in a conversation about nationalism. What does it mean? How is it expressed? Why does it matter? Why does it matter right now as your nation races my nation down a mountain that my nation has butchered to be a better Olympic host than your nation ever was?

Nationalism is an emotion and a tool. It’s “ethnic,” “civic,” “black,” “white,” “orange.” Qualify it as you like. It still creates borders and boundaries. Nationalism is about identity…and difference…and superiority. But it’s also about togetherness. This Afternoon School is an exploration. Come with curiosity, questions, and ideas. Come with images, clips, quotes, songs, and stories about nationalism. Let’s learn together. Arts ‘n crafts included.

Cineworks gratefully acknowledges the ongoing support of our membership, volunteer and funders–the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia and the City of Vancouver.

Press

West Ender, February 4-10, 2010