An influential media arts centre in Vancouver could must shut down after 5 a long time in the neighborhood, except it may possibly increase C$50,000 ($35,800) by the top of the 12 months. In an announcement late final month the Vivo Media Arts Centre, an artist-run centre and video distribution library, pleaded for pressing help.
“We face a hire affordability disaster that threatens our potential to serve artists and the group on the degree now we have sustained for 5 a long time,” the announcement reads partly. “Town of Vancouver has elevated our hire by 30% and imposed annual hikes that far outpace our funding sources.”
In keeping with the announcement, that 30% improve represents all the working income Vivo obtained from the town, leaving the centre with nothing to help workers or programming.
“This disaster just isn’t solely about hire, it’s about defending jobs for native artists, safeguarding cultural infrastructure and making certain Vancouver doesn’t lose certainly one of its longest-standing artist-run centres,” Vivo’s supervisor Carla Ritchie tells The Artwork Newspaper. “With out intervention, the influence will ripple throughout the town’s cultural sector, affecting hundreds of artists, organisations and college students who depend on Vivo to make sure art-making is reasonably priced and accessible, in addition to group members and organisations who rely on Vivo’s sources, mentorship and archival entry.”
The humanities centre’s funding drive has as of this writing raised virtually C$9,500 ($6,800). In keeping with Ritchie, the funding being sought will assist finance operations and workers prices for the remainder of this 12 months and the primary few months of 2026. The centre’s fiscal 12 months begins in January, when funding can be replenished.
Vivo was based in 1973 by a bunch of artists who met on the Matrix Video Convention on the Vancouver Artwork Gallery. Its preliminary function was to advertise the non-commercial use of video expertise via a public video library. Its mission grew to offer tools leases, artist workshops and public details about media arts. The house later turned the Video Inn, serving as a useful resource and casual hangout for artists.
Over time Vivo has hosted artists and curators together with Paul Wong, Abbas Akhavan (who will characterize Canada at subsequent 12 months’s Venice Biennale) and Hank Bull. It organises occasions, exhibitions, artist and curatorial residencies, and media workshops and has hosted festivals such because the Vancouver New Music Pageant and a efficiency artwork biennial. It is usually dwelling to the Crista Dahl Media Library and Archive, certainly one of Canada’s most essential collections of video by artists and impartial producers. With greater than 5,000 video titles, an intensive print supplies assortment and picture archive, many see the centre as a significant civic and inventive useful resource. Video collections safeguarded in Vivo’s archive embody the Girls’s Labour Historical past Mission, the First Nations Entry Program and Vancouver Standing of Girls.
Wong, a multidisciplinary artist who labored on the centre’s first video library within the Nineteen Seventies, is certainly one of many artists alarmed on the menace to Vivo’s future. The centre “was my work and life and group—it nonetheless is. It was the incubator for therefore many artists and video-makers in Vancouver, throughout Canada and internationally. It’s a rare organisation nonetheless on the forefront of modern and experimental and non-commercial exploration of digital artwork and storytelling kinds.”
Pete Fry, a Vancouver metropolis councillor who serves because the council liaison on the town’s Council Arts and Tradition Advisory Committee, tells The Artwork Newspaper he’s “not satisfied” that municipal authorities will assist clear up Vivo’s actual property woes.
“Vivo is a superb, residing instance of artist-run excellence, and sadly is falling sufferer to the pressures of runaway land hypothesis, gentrification and an detached political setting,” Fry says. “The place the centre as soon as had affordable hopes for a yet-unrealised developer-contributed house, as an alternative they’re struggling to maintain up with industrial rents in a municipally-owned interim house. At present, ‘highest and greatest use’ is the mantra for the town’s actual property division, and the feckless council majority I’m on the skin of are pushing for an election 12 months austerity finances.”
