Olympics Cash and Vancouver’s Cutural Community Lines are being drawn between those who accepted Cultural Olympiad money, and those who refused it
Wednesday morning, as people gathered at the WISE hall for the first Olympics Resistance Summit, I had a conversation about the arts in this city that had me thinking all day. It’s not that what was talked about was new, or particularly revelatory. It was the tangible feeling that lines are being drawn. On one side are cultural groups that took money from the Olympics, and on the other, those that refused it.
Case in point, the Purple Thistle. The February edition of their broadsheet, The Thistler, features an editorial about civil disobedience and a “riot 2010″ graphic on the front page. Conceived as a sort of free school, the Purple Thistle center has become a space for youth to create art and media, to discuss, and to learn from one another. They are also one of a handful of local artist groups that had access to money from the Cultural Olympiad and made a collective decision to reject that money.
“We just don’t want to owe anybody any thing,” said Aly de la Cruz, a member of the Purple Thistle Collective.
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