welcome to videocan

videocan dreams of a world where artists from across the land now known as Canada can see the works of their peers and be inspired by new ideas and new forms regardless of where they practice. We have decided to embrace video documentation as one of the most powerful tools for educating artists about what is actually being made today.

Entirely artist-driven and always free to access, we want to shift the prejudices against the dissemination of video and shift the contexts in which performance discourse takes place. videocan’s mission is to gather full-length archival video of contemporary performances from across this country in a catalogue that can be explored by professional artists and art students alike, deepening the understanding of contemporary performance.

To read more about the project, click here.

regarding ‘Canada’ and the ‘can’ of videocan

How are we to name the thing that brings artists in so-called Canada together?

Within the context of this project, we use the term “Canada”. We do so by using it to broadly refer to the geographic landscape represented by so-called Canada on a map, a geographical space where artists are working, to which they are responding, and, in our opinion, where they are lacking a platform to see their work alongside their peers.

Nevertheless, we recognize the problematic nature of using the word “Canada” for defining the scope of this archive and project, for we know that in Canada there are:

artists who do not recognize the legitimacy of the state of Canada and stand in resistance against the state and its identities for their violent, colonial histories of genocide, land theft, anti-Black racism, capitalism, brutality, heteropatriarchy and other forms of oppressive control;
artists who consider the state of Canada legitimate but actively refuse to accept or be erased by the identity of ‘Canadian’;
artists who both see the state as legitimate and embrace the identity of ‘Canadian’ as something suitable, if not meaningful, to the understanding of their work.

If you do not identify as a “Canadian artist”, but rather actively refuse that identity for some of the reasons above, know that this archive is still for you. We believe in the peerhood of artists that share this geography and context and are continually working out language that more clearly speaks to the complexities associated with the borders forcibly placed on this land and the identities this land supports.

— videocan

questions, queries, concerns, as well as requests to join the archival team can be directed to videocan.archivist@gmail.com

[please note that this website is currently in a working prototype phase and is in constant development—videocan currently has funding for a complete redesign of all aspects of the site.]

videocan’s research is funded by the Digital Strategy Fund of the Canada Council for the Arts.