ProgrammingCall for SubmissionsNewsBecome a Member
Rentals + Services
About VIVO
Archive
Video Out Distribution
DonateBuy VIVO Totes
A mail art project that draws on VIVO Media Arts Centre archives to enliven Vancouver’s histories of porn, feminism, and censorship.
By Hazel Meyer and Cait McKinney
Design and Research Assistance by Erin F. Chan
Conceived in dialog with Karen Knights and the Archive / Counter-Archive Gendered Violence: Responses and Remediations case study.
In the 1980s, many feminists opposed to porn drew on the language of gender violence to make their case, arguing that all sexually explicit images of women were harmful. Working against this position and the creep of censorship into smaller moving image formats in the province, queer and feminist artists defended sexual expression and created alternative visual languages for sex. Each side organized conferences and screenings, wrote position papers, protested, and kept making their work through it all.
You will be mailed one of two dossiers. Playing with questions of polarization and memory, one dossier represents the working files of an anti-porn feminist; the other of an artist/organizer involved in anti-censorship work. Some of the records are real, others we imagined based on scraps, remnants, and gossip.
Register to receive a mailing using this form. The first 100 registrants will be mailed a dossier in July 2022, and subsequent registrants will receive a digital edition by email.
Content warning: The mailings include archival records related to porn, kink, and gender violence and you are agreeing to receive this material in the mail.
Hazel and Cait’s collaborations explore their shared attachments to queer histories through research, writing, and archival interventions. Their work has been presented by No More Potlucks (CA), Little Joe: Queers and Cinema Magazine (UK), PHILE (DE), INCITE Journal of Experimental Media (US), Eastern Edge (CA), EMILIA-AMALIA (CA), and Deep Down Body Thirst, curated by the collective Radclyffe Hall for the Glasgow International, SCT (2018). Their film Slumberparty, 2018 has been screened at various festivals including London International Film Festival (2018), Artists’ Moving Image Festival, Tramway & LUX Scotland, SCT (2019) and the Porn Film Festival Berlin, DE (2019.) They are currently working on They, Olympia a video about the 1990 Vancouver Gay Games.
*quote from Himani Bannerji’s address at The Heat is On! Women on ART on SEX conference held at Women in Focus, Vancouver, 1985.
Image: Brochure from Visual Evidence screening and workshop series (1987) and photograph of Elaine Miller, Vanessa Kwan, and Prune (2022).
Co-sponsors:
VIVO is located in the homelands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples in a warehouse space at 2625 Kaslo Street south of East Broadway at the end of E 10th. Transit line 9 stops at Kaslo Street on Broadway. From the bus stop, the path is paved, curbless, and on a slight decline. The closest skytrain station is Renfrew Station, which is three blocks south-east of VIVO and has an elevator. From there, the path is paved, curbless, and on a slight incline. There is parking available at VIVO, including wheelchair access parking. There is a bike rack at the entrance. The front entrance leads indoors to a set of 7 stairs to the lobby.
A wheelchair ramp is located at the west side of the main entrance. The ramp has two runs: the first run is 20 feet long, and the second run is 26 feet. The ramp is 60 inches wide. The slope is 1:12. The ramp itself is concrete and has handrails on both sides. There is an outward swinging door (34 inch width) at the top of the ramp leading to a vestibule. A second outward swinging door (33 inch width) opens into the exhibition space. Buzzers and intercoms are located at both doors to notify staff during regular office hours or events to unlock the doors. Once unlocked, visitors can use automatic operators to open the doors.
There are two all-gender washrooms. One has a stall and is not wheelchair accessible. The other is a single room with a urinal and is wheelchair accessible: the door is 33 inches wide and inward swinging, without automation. The toilet has 11 inch clearance on the left side and a handrail.
To reach the bathrooms from the studio, exit through the double doors and proceed straight through the lobby and down the hall . Turn left, and the two bathrooms will be on your right side. The closest one has a stall and is not wheelchair accessible. The far bathroom is accessible.
Hazel Meyer’s work with installation, performance, and text investigates the relationships between sport, sexuality, feminism, and material culture.
Hazel Meyer works with installation, performance, and text to investigate the relationships between sexuality, feminism, and material culture. Her work aims to recover the queer aesthetics, politics, and bodies often effaced within histories of infrastructure, athletics and illness. Drawing on archival research, she designs immersive installations that bring various troublemakers—lesbians-feminists, gender outlaws, leather-dykes—into a performative space that centres desire, queerness, and sweat.
Hazel presently lives in Vancouver, on the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh and Səl̓ílwətaɬ Nations with her frequent collaborator and partner Cait McKinney and dog Regie.
Cait McKinney is an assistant professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University specializing in sexuality studies, media history, feminist media studies, and activist media. McKinney's research examines the politics of information in queer social movements, focusing on how these movements struggle to provide vital access to information using new digital tools, within conditions where that access is often precarious. This work considers how queer and feminist social justice initiatives offers novel approaches to issues of accessibility, data-management, and participation in networked media environments. Their current research focuses on HIV/AIDS and digital media, and queer activist responses to early online content regulation. McKinney was previously a Media@McGill Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University, Montréal, and a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Information.
