Vidéo de Femmes Dans le Parc: Feminist Rhythms and Festival Times Under Covid

Abstract

Vidéo de Femmes dans le Parc (VFP) (Women’s Videos in the Park) is a summertime open-air screening of independent short videos, held annually since 1991 at Park La Fontaine in Montreal, Canada, by Groupe Intervention Vidéo (GIV), an independent feminist/queer distribution company. In this essay, we explore VFP’s historical use of public space and its reimagination under Covid’s urgent sanitary crisis and chronic social inequities. Within the media ecology of Montreal’s outdoor cinemas, we see GIV’s creative decision to move VFP online during Covid as part of a longer history of alternative media’s unconventional exhibition modes that address social inequalities. As such, we first situate VFP within GIV’s wider mandate of dissemination of video work by women. We then analyze VFP’s “visual architecture” under Covid, stressing the organizers’ original strategies to reproduce a sense of eventness even through online exhibition. We conclude with questions of embodied and affective labor, including audiences’ wellbeing, artist renumeration, and self-care, that the shift online entails for the organizers of VFP.