Andy Nichols

Inter-disciplinary artist Eric Moschopedis, ironically captured in Calgary’s Cultural District. Throughout 2010, Fast Forward Weekly is tapping into Calgarians throughout the city, to get their views about how they perceive Calgary’s future.

Eric Moschopedis

Inter-disciplinary artist

What is your favourite spot in the world?

Last summer, Mia Rushton and I were in Zurich and along the river there they have these decks. You can just hang out there for free and drink beer and eat sausages. I would go back there again.

I think my two favourite cities in the world would either be Dawson City or Portland, Or.

Choose between a Sandra Bullock or a Keanu Reeves movie.

I suppose Miss Congeniality would be my pick over the Matrix. Because while the Matrix tries to inform us about some sort of metaphysical approach to the world, I think Sandra Bullock does a way better job.

Who would win in a fight: a bear or a shark? Two fights, one on land, one in the water.

I think the bear would win.

The current scene in Calgary, it’s funny. Ten years ago, and before, people were always saying Calgary is on the cusp of something good. Still, today, it’s repeated.

I find it a very strange thing. Calgary’s not on the cusp, Calgary will never be on the cusp. I’m very excited by what’s going on in Calgary. I’m very happy to be here. People say ‘If only people would stick around, then maybe the city would be better,’ but I don’t know that that’s true. I think the people who are here are actually doing great work, a lot of work that travels around. It doesn’t just have Calgary-itis. From music, to visual art, to theatre and dance, we have artists who are operating on the international stage. In that regard, I don’ think we’re really a backwater.

I love Portland so much because of the way in which artists basically localized themselves there and just built it up and did work. No one describes Portland as world-class, but no one describes it as a backwater either. It’s a hub of activity and I think that’s sort of how Calgary is in a lot of ways.

I really appreciate the peer-assessed funding model for the arts; I think it works very well. But the culture of Calgary is that it’s a corporate city, so there’s sort of an insistence from corporations to be involved. I’m radically opposed to that. I don’t think that it’s for a corporation to choose our culture for us. My system would be much different. I suppose it would be taking those resources and putting them back into a government-funded system where those who are experts in that area make decisions in that area, as opposed to a corporation.

Things that should change in the city in terms of arts and culture: Burn the Cultural District, kill off the cult of Richard Florida and the creative cities movement and end the supremacy of white, hetero-normative and patriarchal culture. We’re talking about culture here, but I think what we’re really talking about is white culture. I think that’s really problematic. In Calgary we keep talking about ‘What’s the future of this city’s culture?’ There’s this assumption that it’s this white culture we’re talking about and that’s why I think the notion of a cultural district is fascistic — it’s a monoculture that’s being created. It’s not about Asian artists, or South Asian artists or South American or African. It’s about this white art form.

What would I love to see going forward? I would love to see more women at the helm of our arts organizations (beyond those that have already forged a path, such as Vanessa Porteous at Alberta Theatre Projects or Kerry Clarke at the Calgary Folk Music Festival), I’d like to see aboriginal artists and artists of other cultural backgrounds become more prominent. I would love to see these other cultures receive the same prominence and the same attention, or more attention, than our current society is providing.

I think it’s an ideological shift that has to take place. There has to be this shift in perception of how we deal with and how we think about what culture is. That sounds like a huge thing. How the fuck are we supposed to change the ideology of white, Christian, conservative Calgary? But these are some of the things that my collaborator, Mia, and I are trying to approach with our work. How can you give people a sense of agency and create democratic spaces and democratic engagement? How can we create these places where dialogue can exist?

I think right now there’s far more monologue and, again, this becomes my critique of cultural districts and creative cities — it’s a monologue as opposed to a dialogue. I think that’s the real crux of the issue: How do we start talking about these sorts of things?

I bitch and complain about certain things, but I’m incredibly proud of the work people in Calgary are doing. But I think that sometimes it’s important to sort of assess what we’re doing, and have conversations about what we’re doing. Who’s downtown? Who’s in that financial district? Hardly anyone. The people who are there during the day are there to work and not particularly there for a cultural experience, which I suppose is unfortunate. But we know that people go home in the evenings to their inner-city communities or to their suburban communities and maybe that’s where we ought to be. I don’t mean that we should have a dead zone downtown, but to have a cultural district for a bourgeois class doesn’t totally make sense to me when there are hundreds of thousands of other people who you could have some relationship with.

As told to Drew Anderson