Curation as the Cure for the Archive: Groupe Intervention Video’s Vidéos des Femmes dans le Parc

Founded in 1975 by activist artists who saw the new technology of portable video as a means to analyze and disseminate information about social struggles, GIV reoriented its mandate in the late 1970s to explicitly embrace feminist politics.⁹ In tune with the era, GIV firmly believed in the democratic potential of participatory media and provided support and training to women who wanted to make videos.¹⁰ Working collaboratively with the broader network of feminist organizations in Montreal and other parts of Quebec, GIV set up a distribution infrastructure to foster participatory modes of exhibition in local-scale spaces to catalyze community involvement. The 1970s marked a period of political upheavals that fostered activist video practices in Quebec, but GIV’s mandate to promote feminist activism across both francophone and anglophone circuits made it distinct.¹¹ GIV was closely aligned to the rise of feminist collectives in Quebec during the 1960s and the 1970s that were committed to sociopolitical action and the creation of spaces for cultural and artistic expression.¹² Within this grassroots network of feminist organizations, GIV was one of the first to integrate transnational perspectives and politics in its practices by including in its collection videos on women’s movements from different generations and cultures and forging connections with artists and video centers, especially in Europe and in Latin America. Today, while GIV is geographically located within a historically francophone neighborhood in Montreal, it nonetheless reaches the vast international and immigrant population of the city, fostering bilingualism across its events, newsletters, flyers, and other promotional materials. Moreover, GIV also promotes multilingualism, seen in the constituency of its current staff, including first-generation immigrants from Latin America (Brazil, Cuba, and Chile), and through the many languages found in the works in its catalogs.

Throughout the 1980s, GIV maintained an activist approach to video making and distribution but gradually shifted its focus to distribution. As of 2023, its collection has accumulated around 1,880 titles by 430 artists. During the 1990s, the shift to distribution was rooted in the work of curation and exhibition to a larger public, which prompted the first edition of VFP in 1991. While much curation across artist-run centers in Canada and other art institutions internationally in the 1970s and 1980s was organized around “issues” and representation, VFP reflected the emergent intuition that such an approach was not wholly adequate to the wider complexities of feminist lives because they could not be so easily reduced to single-issue labels. Indeed, VFP tackles feminist video practices that expand beyond realist concerns and documentary strategies, including experimental, self-reflexive approaches to video-making. In bringing together documentaries and video art, VFP intertwines feminist formal concerns with political purpose.

Since 1991 GIV has considered curation central to its feminist mandate and describes feminism as the motor of its interventions. Its curatorial practices are designed to promote and support the artists and works it distributes, and to cultivate a public presence for feminist experimental video work both contemporary and historical.¹³ Within GIV, curation is an act of care: not only does it involve the intellectual labor of putting together and contextualizing video programs, it also fosters community, creating a space of interrelation and exchange between feminist and queer curators, artists, and audiences. According to a statement by GIV: “the importance of our work [at GIV] is in the connections we create with the community and the artists as well as in the gatherings, exchanges, and the accessibility that we facilitate.”¹⁴ By placing community-building through curatorial work at the core of its activities, GIV centers social reproduction, intended as the labor of creating relational bonds and of ensuring the survival of feminist and queer communities, in its art practices. Annaëlle Winand, GIV’s former artistic codirector, notes: “the words ‘women’ and ‘intervention’ remain key to our mandate, which throughout the years, has adapted to include overarching sociocultural realities.”¹⁵ Over time, GIV has expanded its mandate to take an intersectional, trans-inclusive, decolonial, and disability justice approach. GIV’s inclusive sense of the term “women” means that its community of artists is made up not only of cis women, but also nonbinary and trans people, prioritizing self-identification on the part of artists over the course of their lives and careers.¹⁶

The longevity of GIV as an institution is astounding and rare. In her history of Canadian feminist video art collectives, Marusya Bociurkiw claims that “archiving and restoration have been haphazard at best.…Thus far, this has been an archive without archivists, an era without a publicist, a history without a memory.”¹⁷ We argue, however, that, far from an “archive without archivists,” GIV, as an accidental archive, has preserved not only materials but the skills of survival and resilience. “Accidental archive” better describes the relation between GIV’s historical, intergenerational, and intersectional practices and offers a more robust analysis of their success, survival, and challenges. While the term has recently gained currency in global cinema and media studies, Alves first offered us this offhand characterization of GIV during a site visit in 2019.¹⁸ Alves and others at GIV stress that they function as a “non-professional” archive, without technical infrastructure such as climate-controlled storage, archival expertise, dedicated staff, material support, or funding that would allow them to function as a professional and accredited archive. As Joanna Plant has shown in her 2015 dissertation on Canadian artist-run center archives, “‘non-professionalism’ is typical of this type of institution.”¹⁹ While GIV was not one of Plant’s case studies, its ability to adapt its practices to serve the needs of its community, rather than respond to the dictates of funding agencies, is characteristic of the artist-run center model that she describes. Plant underscores that artist-run centers’ practices of collecting, informal archiving, and managing their own history remains relatively understudied, and her work serves as an important counterepistemology to more mainstream definitions of the archives, reflecting different needs and desires.²⁰

Despite its longevity, GIV is shadowed by precarity, a point to which we will return at the end of this essay. However, our encounters with GIV lead us to reframe their nonprofessionalism more accurately as an “alter-professionalism” that prioritizes different aspects of sustaining legacies and histories than those demanded by funders, government agencies, or the problematic legacy of so many forms of state archives. As GIV describes: “[VFP] is an eloquent example of GIV’s representative and regular activities, which invite us to reflect on questions relating to the place we occupy in today’s cultural landscape, between tradition and longevity.”²¹

If one origin of curation is “to take care of,” we would suggest that for GIV, curation has emerged as the cure for the archive, in particular, the demands to serve as an archive under conditions that they neither chose nor intended. On the one hand, the “accidental” nature of their archive testifies to the ways that they have responded in an ongoing fashion and with all means at their disposal to the failure of establishment archives to preserve and care for the works and communities GIV represents, as well as the piecemeal nature of arts funding in Canada. If we frame the archive as sick, it is for the state’s ongoing failure to adequately care for art and makers across the lifespan of both artwork and artist. GIV has nonetheless taken on this job that they didn’t know they had and have continued to practice curation as curative, both in hindsight and in a speculative forecasting, as an active annotative process that accounts for and reimagines their history, present, and futurity. In this sense, preservation (of work preselected “to be lost”) and curation are means to the same end: the effectuation of a change of state, via what GIV artistic director Anne Golden terms “the alchemical potential of the curatorial act.”²² The “accident” articulates an intersectional feminist obliqueness to archival impulses, rerouted through curatorial practice into a lively, embodied, and crucially intergenerational practice of exchange and sustainability. The demands of preservation are always up against a material precarity that GIV counters through the living archive of community. We do not accuse GIV of “failing” as a traditional archive because it was never intended to be an archive. But its expansive labor means that it finds itself—like many nonprofit arts organizations—looking back on its own history, to the inevitable amassing of digital and physical materials that have accumulated after years of programming, events, and activities. This accidental status tells us something important about how a queer, feminist, intersectional archive might act, adapt, and survive.

Among GIV’s several dissemination activities aimed at promoting its collection through curated programs, VFP stands out both as emblematic and exceptional. Video programs at GIV often draw from their own catalog or present the work of an artist. Other times, external curators are invited to put together a video program. For VFP, GIV curates an overview of independent short videos produced in the last two years by women, following an open call to Canadian-based artists, with no entry fee. Each year GIV receives between 120 to 170 submissions, for a final program of around one hour (typically ten to fourteen videos) that is presented to the Montreal public in an open-air, end-of-summer screening in a major park. The approach to selecting works affirms GIV’s collective-based ethos, as staff members collaboratively watch and select the videos, and through their conversations, let emergent concerns across the works guide the curatorial process. For instance, the fifteenth edition curatorial statement from 2006 notes that “these videos are nets cast widely, yielding visions of social justice, political messages, ecological manifestos, spiritual wonders, physical contortions, and technological trickery.”²³

VFP’s program is indissociable from the unconventional mode of its exhibition: an outdoor screening, held since its founding (except during a period of infrastructural renovations 2015–20 and during COVID) at the Théatre de Verdure, an open-air amphitheatre in Parc La Fontaine, in the heart of the city. For the first years of VFP, GIV had to work with DIY technological infrastructure: the organizers schlepped a bulky U-matic video player, and video tapes were played manually one after the other. While the first program, from 1991, is missing from the archive, Anne Golden reconstructed from memory some critical details to convey what this was like:

That first year, GIV went into its own archive for the “works we thought were important to show.”²⁵ But very quickly this approach changed, taking on a more aleatory response to the question of importance. In the mid-1990s VFP switched to an open-call format that invited women to speak back through their submissions to determine what should count and what needed to be heard. Says Golden, “I think that in the 90s, we were just trying different things. And we were also trying to stay open to what was out there.”²⁶ Throughout the years, GIV has experimented with various formats: in 1995, VFP was presented as Vidéo Pique-Nique (picnic) alongside Videographe’s Vidéo des gars dans le parc (“Guys’ videos in the park”). In the twenty-first century, digital screening infrastructure has greatly eased the presentational burden, even as it has also increased the number of submissions. When the venue was closed for renovations between 2015 and 2019, GIV adopted an inventive solution, setting up an inflatable screen on the grass just outside of the closed outdoor theater (see figure 1). Inscribed in the name of the event itself, the outdoor screening in the festive setting of the park is what defines VFP. Many of the annual programs stress the alternative and almost otherworldly dimension that a public park constitutes for video art: “A stroll in the park on a hot summer night can lead to many things: romance, ice-cream, and video-art.”²⁷ VFP conforms to the tradition of free and public outdoor screenings that have come to occupy a growing place in Montreal’s summer programming, which tends to showcase work outside of current feature films (for instance, film noir from Film Noir au Canal, documentary from Cinéma sous les étoiles by Funambules Media, Indigenous productions from Wapikoni Mobile, etc.).²⁸ This setting also showcases how GIV distinguishes itself from many other artist-run centers in Montreal through its format, aimed at a wide public and scheduled during the “off season” (summer). In their 2011 study of Montreal’s artist-run centers, Giorgio Tavano Blessi, Pier Luigi Sacco, and Thomas Pilatti note that generally “independent art centres seem to focus on their role of platforms for ‘inner circle’ audiences, which are already familiar with, and very knowledgeable about, the latest trends in experimental contemporary visual art. They have no particular incentive to reach vast audiences, or to meet any specific criteria of economic efficiency or even effectiveness.”²⁹ In contrast, GIV’s commitment to VFP’s open and accessible format underscores the importance of “calling in” as a feminist methodology, to break open the “inner circles” that have excluded many from exposure to experimental film.

This setting is so important that even during the COVID-19 pandemic, GIV tried to reproduce VFP’s “visual architecture,” a term coined by Antoine Damiens to name the visual branding of festivals, in the trailer for the online program for the 2020 edition.³⁰ Likewise, the two trailers produced for anniversary editions in 2001 and 2021 condense, in about two minutes, three key qualities of VFP: the curation of video art, outdoor convivial exhibition space, and the labor of care involved in organizing the event. As such, these trailers serve as a testimony to and archive of GIV’s practices. In particular, the VHS trailer from 2001 is a precious document, a highlight reel of the type of video work of VFP’s first ten years, the most difficult period to reconstruct (see video 1). The trailer, video art in its own right, starts with an animation homage recalling the analog “noise” of glitchy VHS. A montage of excerpts follows, showcasing the variety of VFP’s programming: from documentaries on women’s work (most likely from the very first edition of VFP) to fierce footage of feminist rallies to animation to some of the classics of video art in the Canadian and international context, such as Seeing is believing (Shauna Beharry, 1991), a video about the limits of the photographic medium and the activation of memory through touch, and Mr. B (Cathy Sisler, 1994), an ironic video about gender performativity. Techno music in the 1990s-style, characterized by syncopation and repetitions, accompanies images of the audience at the Théâtre de Verdure, and we see Anne Golden carrying a video player and Petunia talking on the phone (see video 1). The video ends with another image of video static and an intertitle acknowledging artists, workers, founders, and audience.

Likewise, the trailer for VFP’s thirtieth anniversary in 2021, directed by Montreal-based artist and GIV close collaborator Manon Labrecque (1965–2023), proposes a metareflection on the signal and noise of video technology. The animated video starts with an intermittent beep as GIV’s logo emerges from a black background in jump cuts. SMPTE color bars—vertical colored bars used as a test pattern to adjust picture quality in analog video monitors—briefly appear on the screen and then form the background to a sequence of photos. On the soundtrack, a heartbeat speeds up, skips, flatlines, and pulses. The first photos are of Théâtre de Verdure—at sunset when the seats start to fill in and at night full of spectators—and of GIV staff members working the event. The second series of photos shows off VFP archival ephemera: posters, flyers, and booklets. An animation of the colored booklets aligned together enters the frame as a series of strips from right to left, while leaving behind another series of colored bars: the ones of the rainbow flag. Once the LGBTQ flag entirely occupies the screen, the arrow of the inclusive “Progress Pride” flag, representing trans and queer people of color, enters the frame from left to right, leaving behind itself a photo of GIV core staff introducing a screening (see video 2). Finally, the third photo series attests to VFP’s history of resilience and adaptability as they show the audience sitting on the grass and looking at the inflatable screen and GIV staff introducing the online edition of VFP, held in 2020. Labrecque’s trailer creatively curates GIV’s archival material from VFP, reflecting the evolving intersectional politics of feminism within GIV. The trailer concludes with VFP’s logo preceded by a gigantic “30” (to mark VFP’s thirtieth anniversary) over images of colorful fireworks; a celebration, but also an allusion to Montreal’s Fireworks Festival, one of the main events organized over the summer by the city (see video 2). By superimposing VFP’s logo over fireworks, Labrecque implies that VFP is, after thirty years, an established, awaited, and popular event of Montreal’s summer cultural scene.

For VFP’s thirtieth anniversary, with COVID restrictions still in place, GIV decided to hold VFP online for the second consecutive year. For this edition, curators Golden, Winand, and Verónica Sedano Alvarez chose videos that reflected pandemic feelings: temporal stasis, adaptations to remote working, and inventive artistic strategies for distanced lives. The program opened with Karen Trask’s 20-20, five short videos of 20 seconds each drawn from Montreal-based pandemic exquisite corpse video project 2gatherapart.³¹ Moving from immobility to various forms of travels (exilic, diasporic, metaphoric) and from oblique “personal” observations to overt intersectional feminist statements, the program of VFP@30 alternated performance art, essays, videos, desktop documentaries, and animation. Videos spoke to the gendered dimension of the social inequalities, mental health issues, and precarious labor conditions exacerbated by the pandemic. In Edge of Doom (2020), artist Michaela Grill edits in a split-screen found footage clips from silent films of the 1920s, showing women in a state of madness and despair through their excessive gestures that suggest the emotions and the affect that arose during confinement.³² In How to perform teaching during a pandemic, spring session (2021), Dayna McLeod reproduces the tics and glitches, not to mention the affective labor, of online teaching. The desktop documentary Inuit Languages in the 21st Century (Ulivia Uvilik, 2020) tackles the precarious conditions of Inuit languages, and in the poetic essay Houbout/Landing (Chantal Partamian, 2020), a disembodied voice-over in Arabic hints at the challenges of long-distance relationships. Laura Kamugisha’s Mitochondrial (2019), through an experimental and at first abstract form, addresses Black women’s political energy and political cohesion against mainstream representation.

As we wrote this article, the 2023 call was circulating. After several years of pandemic adaptations and a return to the newly reopened Théâtre de Verdure in the summer of 2022, GIV might well have expected a breather from the relentless crises of the decade so far. The companionable pleasure of screening submissions should not have required much more than “walking up with a USB stick in hand” after decades of contributing to Montreal’s summer arts scene.

But in a surprise decision, the programmers at the Théâtre de Verdure announced in 2023 that after thirty years in the park, GIV would no longer be part of the program “due to high demand.” The consequences of this are significant. Pandemic restrictions have survived the lifting of health controls, lingering in the form of a more tightly controlled and bureaucratized management of public space. It is less easy to simply pivot toward more DIY methods for public presentation in the kinds of popular and accessible spaces that VFP demands. And exhaustion lingers among workers in the arts, in particular those at the edge of the mainstream. For the programmers, the show will go on even if it’s simply a screening in GIV’s intimate office space—indeed, acceptance notifications for the 2023 event included a TBA for the event location and date—but the questionable decision to abandon the legacy of this project showcases the “value” of women’s work under current conditions. Women left the workforce en masse during the pandemic in part due to inadequate supports for the second shift of care labor. Women left the arts as they often lacked the financial and cultural capital to continue under conditions of unpredictable precarity. If VFP programs often form portraits of feminist concerns on the part of their makers, what traces of curatorial concerns might we expect this year? What kind of desires might be found in the gaps between videos? As Golden says about the decision: “I do think that people still think of this as a marginal event.…We call it videos by women in the park, blatantly…to really put that forward and because it’s still important, right? But I think that GIV/VFP still suffers from the fact that people cannot wrap their brains around the fact that it’s an organization that’s a feminist organization. It’s like feminism first and art second, right?”³³ Rather than a simple inversion of a hierarchy, these priorities reveal how feminist concerns in content and practice are too often understood as “optional” in how the arts are supported and valued. Golden’s comments reflect how inextricably entangled art and feminism are in GIV’s programming and point out how certain publics and city programmers see hierarchies between the two, revealing their dismissal of feminism (and by extension, feminists and our labor). Golden’s reordering is an attempt to rescript the relation, a tactical reframing that foregrounds feminism as a necessity to challenge and expand what counts as art.

GIV’s call for submissions for women and nonbinary artists to show video art at VFP serves not just to call out for works, but to call in artists, audiences, and communities—practices of care that serve artists and audiences by facilitating the production and distribution of activist and experimental video works that showcase necessary voices and visions. This call-in serves multiple ends. It signals to artists (Dayna McLeod: like myself) that our work is appreciated and valued despite its status in mainstream contemporary art markets or normative distribution and reception systems and venues because these works challenge and expand what “counts” as art. It summons audiences keen to engage with activist and experimental video that work under an umbrella of intersectional feminist ideals and include accessible practices of viewing that are free, subtitled, and presented in wheelchair-accessible venues. It interpellates potential future artists in the audience (yes, GIV converts) who may not yet have recognized themselves as future members. We underscore here the need to call out those who would see GIV and VFP disappear, who refuse to acknowledge the integral value GIV has as an arts center that serves an intersectional feminist community and agenda, as demonstrated by the city of Montreal not making (literal) space for VFP at the Théatre de Verdure in 2023, after thirty years of showings. What this omission makes clear is the precarity of a feminist place and space, and how easily it can be eliminated and replaced regardless of its longevity. By continuing to call out for works for the 2023 edition despite not having a venue for the screening at the time of this writing, GIV re-marks the city’s removal of VFP while calling in and caring for artists and audiences. This call-in of care calls out the need for commitment to feminist activist and experimental art practices as essential to the presentation of a multiplicity of perspectives, talent, and visions.