On March 4, 2024, the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) announced the abandonment of its Les Espaces bleus cultural project. After calculating the additional costs of the four projects already under construction, the Minister of Culture and Communications, Mathieu Lacombe, decided that the 18 new museums dedicated to promoting Quebec’s cultural heritage would not see the light of day. Since then, Québec solidaire and the Parti Québécois have proposed redirecting the remaining funds. The first suggests the museum environment and the second, regional media. Beyond partisan positions, we believe that the most forgotten are the organizations dedicated to independent creation located at the start of the value chain.
The cultural environment is certainly made up of institutions, but above all of artists and cultural workers who bring them to life. Many of them work within small structures established in our cities and regions since the 1970s. Let us think in particular of self-managed artist centers, non-profit organizations that have paved the way for a line of collectives dedicated to experimentation, whose history remains largely unknown and under-publicized. Due to their lack of visibility, these organizations are particularly vulnerable to the multiple crises (economic, political, epidemic, digital, etc.) affecting the sector. In their workshops and offices, their members are busy finding solutions to sustain their structure, often at the risk of their health.
Recent studies attest to the strong socio-economic precariousness of artists in the visual and performing arts. This precariousness is the primary cause of artists leaving artistic circles, to which are added the weight of administrative requirements and the race for subsidies. Following these findings, we question the share of funding granted to artists and cultural workers working in independent creative spaces, who struggle to achieve their socio-cultural mission. Programs to promote Quebec culture in a digital context are dear to our current government, but the all-out defense of cultural “products” and the ways of making them “discoverable” on the market tends to make the work done outside of the world invisible. industry and meeting other conventions.
The CAQ think big with show projects, of which Les Espaces bleus was only one iteration, of the same order as the subsidy allocated to the Kings. It’s difficult not to recover the anglicism, borrowed from the character of Elvis Gratton by the Minister of Transport Geneviève Guilbault in 2022, which illustrates a spectacular and centralizing logic of governance disconnected from the needs of those mainly concerned.
The functioning of the cultural financing system also perpetuates this same disconnection from the conditions of artists’ practice: the sums allocated to the realization of artistic projects are rarely linked to the needs of those who manage them at arm’s length. Ultimately, (too big) promises lead to the exhaustion of workers in artistic circles. Shouldn’t the promotion of “local culture” involve the perpetuation of already existing creative structures rather than the construction of an additional network?