An influential media arts centre in Vancouver could must shut down after 5 a long time in the neighborhood, except it could possibly increase C$50,000 ($35,800) by the top of the yr. 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 lease affordability disaster that threatens our potential to serve artists and the neighborhood on the stage we now have sustained for 5 a long time,” the announcement reads partially. “The town of Vancouver has elevated our lease by 30% and imposed annual hikes that far outpace our funding sources.”
In accordance with the announcement, that 30% improve represents the entire working income Vivo obtained from town, leaving the centre with nothing to help employees or programming.
“This disaster isn’t solely about lease, it’s about defending jobs for native artists, safeguarding cultural infrastructure and making certain Vancouver doesn’t lose one in every of its longest-standing artist-run centres,” Vivo’s supervisor Carla Ritchie tells The Artwork Newspaper. “With out intervention, the affect will ripple throughout town’s cultural sector, affecting 1000’s of artists, organisations and college students who depend on Vivo to make sure art-making is inexpensive and accessible, in addition to neighborhood 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 nearly C$9,500 ($6,800). In accordance with Ritchie, the funding being sought will assist finance operations and employees prices for the remainder of this yr and the primary few months of 2026. The centre’s fiscal yr begins in January, when funding shall 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 goal was to advertise the non-commercial use of video know-how by a public video library. Its mission grew to supply gear leases, artist workshops and public details about media arts. The house later grew to become the Video Inn, serving as a useful resource and casual hangout for artists.
Through the years Vivo has hosted artists and curators together with Paul Wong, Abbas Akhavan (who will symbolize Canada at subsequent yr’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’s also house to the Crista Dahl Media Library and Archive, one in every of Canada’s most essential collections of video by artists and impartial producers. With greater than 5,000 video titles, an in depth 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 Ladies’s Labour Historical past Challenge, the First Nations Entry Program and Vancouver Standing of Ladies.
Wong, a multidisciplinary artist who labored on the centre’s first video library within the Nineteen Seventies, is one in every of many artists alarmed on the menace to Vivo’s future. The centre “was my work and life and neighborhood—it nonetheless is. It was the incubator for thus many artists and video-makers in Vancouver, throughout Canada and internationally. It’s a unprecedented organisation nonetheless on the forefront of modern and experimental and non-commercial exploration of digital artwork and storytelling varieties.”
Pete Fry, a Vancouver metropolis councillor who serves because the council liaison on town’s Council Arts and Tradition Advisory Committee, tells The Artwork Newspaper he’s “not satisfied” that municipal authorities will assist remedy Vivo’s actual property woes.
“Vivo is an excellent, 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 business rents in a municipally-owned interim house. At this time, ‘highest and finest use’ is the mantra for town’s actual property division, and the feckless council majority I’m on the skin of are pushing for an election yr austerity price range.”
