Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 215: PUBLIC COLLISIONS — with jorge amigo
Speakers: Names in order of speaking
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Kathy Feng 0:05
Hello listeners, I’m Kathy Feng with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal is joined by Jorge Amigo, the head of cultural programming at the Vancouver Public Library. Together they discuss the power of library public programs, some of Jorge’s past public projects, as well as how the urban design of Vancouver relates to social isolation, and potential paths towards cultivating more friendships. Enjoy the episode!
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Am Johal 0:47
Hello, welcome to Below the Radar. Delighted that you could join us again this week, we have a special guest, Jorge Amigo with us today. Welcome, Jorge.
Jorge Amigo 0:57
Hi Am, great to see you. Thanks for having me.
Am Johal 0:59
All right, I'm wondering if we can begin with you introducing yourself a little bit.
Jorge Amigo 1:04
Yeah. Well, my name is Jorge Amigo, and I am from Mexico City. And yes, Amigo is my last name. Some people always ask me whether that's a pseudonym, or it's my real name. So I always reassure people, it's real. And you know, it's interesting. In my country, I would introduce myself with my two last names, which I never do in Canada. So I'm trying to get back into a habit of bringing that tradition back. So my full name is Jorge Amigo Gonzalez Mariscal. And that's important just to mention, because I think in my country, it really matters where you come from, and the whole family lineage and who got together to form a family. So in Mexico, people generally ask you what your last names are to understand how they connect with you. And it's all about understanding how your family might be related to their family. And so in my case, on the side of my dad, there, my ancestors come from Spain and from France. And on my mom's side, there's a part of the family that comes from Spain and a part of the family that can trace their origins to Indigenous communities in the northern part of Mexico.
Am Johal 1:56
Jorge, I'm wondering if we can begin with you sort of talking about how you first arrived to Vancouver, the context that brought you here when you first moved here?
Jorge Amigo 2:05
Yeah, so long story, but I'll make it brief. I moved to Vancouver in 2007, when I was 25 years old. And part of the reason is, I felt that I wasn't finding myself in Mexico City. I wasn't enjoying the university experience. So I'll back it up a little bit to say that I come from a family of academics and people who are very achieved in academia. So on my mother's side, my grandmother was a very famous historian, who was probably the first feminist scholar in Latin America. She was, I think, the seventh woman to do a PhD in the National University in Mexico, which is the oldest university in the Americas founded in 1521, or '25. And you should fact check that I might have gotten it wrong by ten years. But you know, it was founded by Charles the fifth kind of thing. And so that university, she's like one of the early PhDs. But the story there was that she became this famous historian and emeritus Prof. And then she married my grandfather at age 40. And my grandfather was this military doctor who grew up in a rural mining town north of Mexico, and for some incredible reason, ended up doing his specialty in Harvard Medical School, and became the first neurosurgeon in Mexico and the first neurosurgeon from Harvard. And so these two people suddenly find themselves single with a very stable, unusual careers in Mexico. In an era where, I don't know women were not supposed to go and do PhDs and postdocs and be academics and men were supposed to be married by age 40, especially if they were doctors. And so they had this incredible story. And they had four daughters and all my aunts. My mom's a molecular biologist, my aunts a molecular biologist and neuroscientist. My other aunts were also academics, so on my dad's side, they're all chemical engineer. So what I'm trying to tell you is that I had zero pressure to achieve when I was growing up in Mexico, zero pressure to find my way. And I stumbled around studying a lot of things. I studied chemical engineering, political science, economics, law. And the Mexican university system is very restrictive, there's no electives. And you can't really play around to understand what you want to study. So I felt lost. And through some circumstances, there was a family trip that happened to Whistler when I was 23. And I went to the Museum of Anthropology one day as a tourist, and suddenly emerged in this beautiful campus on a glorious July day and realized 'what am I doing?' Feeling super confused and sad about what I'm doing in Mexico City when I could study in this beautiful campus. And so I found a way to transfer all my credits, and UBC is what brought me here. So I came to finish my undergrad in International Relations here, which allowed me to kind of take all the electives and all the things that I was curious about at the time, and then ended up staying and doing a Master's in Political Science. So that's, that's how I landed here. And yeah.
Am Johal 4:52
Jorge, when I first met you, you were doing a project called 'Be my Amigo' here, and generated a lot of interest and work. And I know it's a few years since you were directly involved with it. But wondering if you can share a little bit about that project and where it started from but also kind of reflecting back on what happened with it.
Jorge Amigo 5:12
Yeah, that's a great question. I don't often have chance to reflect on this. So I appreciate you bringing me back to that. I think this starts with me feeling like Vancouver was a very socially dysfunctional place. Ever since I moved here, I felt like friendships and connection. There was something weird going on here. And my first three years or four years, it wasn't that pronounced because I was a student on campus with an automatic peer group so I have people to hang out with. But as soon as I moved to downtown and started to connect with the city, I realized that one of the common threads that I found is people around me were always telling me they didn't have friends or they were lonely or they found are hard to meet people. And I felt that too. I mean, I could tell you a number of stories, but you know, a brief one. I remember getting invited to a birthday party, some friends of friends from UBC. And it was a birthday party in a public place. It was at Jericho beach on the log. And they just asked me to join so naturally I invited two other people, because it's a birthday party you show up with people at the beach. Didn't feel weird. And people were appalled that I brought people they didn't know that were specifically invited to this birthday party on a giant beach. And so I wrote a critique of Vancouver socializing, it blew up, I got invited to a bunch of radio interviews, because suddenly there's this Mexican that's criticizing Vancouver culture. How dare he because Vancouver is perfect. And Vancouver is the best place in the world. What do you mean, there's something wrong with us? So it really struck a chord, and in one interview with—I think it was with Bill Good at CKNW. You know, he's like, 'well, you know, what are you gonna do about it? You know, a kid, this guy thinks Vancouver is unfriendly, what- what are you going to do about it?' And I don't know, there's a flash of inspiration that came to me and like, let's do a flash mob. And since my last name is Amigo, let's call it 'be my amigo'. And let's have people show up at the art gallery. Flash forward to that turned into a thing, I organized a series of 20 to 25, I think, social dinners that were all free in a place where-- usually I would find bars or restaurants that had long tables where people could just drop in. And I would facilitate conversation between all these strangers. So anywhere between 25, 30 Or sometimes 50, people would show up. I did them almost every other week on a Tuesday. And they got very popular. The timing of it was accidentally perfect. Because the Vancouver Foundation, as I was talking about this, and doing my little initiative, they released their famous report on social isolation around that time, which kind of proved everything that I was talking about, and that the initiative was trying to address and it just gave so much fuel to it's because people immediately were like, well who's doing something about this? And so immediately, this little project that this guy who's just hosting dinners becomes a topic of conversation. So I suddenly got invited to panels and stages. And I talked at the Vogue. And I talked with the Orpheum. And about how we solve this crisis, which was wild experience to me, because I'm not a sociologist, or an expert in socializing. I just happen to have my own PhD in socializing, because I talk to people all the time. But the nice thing about that period, and being treated as an expert, quote, unquote, was that it allowed me to connect with some fabulous people trying to make the city a better place, and who really care about community and just about getting together. So I think the result of my little experiment was that it just allowed me to fall in love with Vancouver in many ways, because I met people trying to make it better. And so it totally changed my perception of what the city could do and what people were trying to do here.
Am Johal 8:27
I really appreciated your intervention, because when that Vancouver Foundation report came out, of course, everyone was jumping around 'what can be done about this', people are feeling terrible. So there ended up being this whole series of talks about how everyone's bummed out, which made them feel even more bummed out. And so it had the exact opposite effect for a brief period. But I felt like you brought some joy and levity to the to the intervention. Jorge, you went to Toronto for a while. And you worked in public programming at the Toronto Public Library and wondering if you can talk a little bit about what you remember about that work, and also like the joy of public programming in a public setting, like a library.
Jorge Amigo 9:06
Yeah, that was my first chance to do public programming at a large scale. And it was the most incredible experience. As you know, Toronto Public Library is the largest library system in North America. And we have 100 libraries. And it was very enriching to have access to some of the biggest names in the world of literature and ideas. Because let's face it, a lot of them live in Toronto, or can easily come to Toronto, quick train from Montreal, easy flight from New York. And so I had a lot of access, we had a big budget, and it was a really interesting time. So I'll tell you briefly the story of how I got hired. I think to me, that's one of the fun memories is like, I was specifically hired to produce and curate a new series called 'On Civil Society'. And to me, the idea was fascinating. So Trump had just gotten elected. Brexit and election had just reshaped British politics. We were living with a result of how fake news can polarize the society. So everyone was freaking out about what's going on. And so the TPL—Toronto Public Library for listeners who don't know what this acronym means—the TPL decides to organize a programming series to try to explain to the population why Western democracies are turning towards populism, and why there's this shift to right wing demagogues, and how can we have civic conversations that don't actually tear society apart? And so that's how we started this series. So I end up getting hired for this. I landed up in Toronto in- and immediately rolled up my sleeves because that series was about to launch. And so suddenly, I'm sitting there hosting events and producing events with some top political thinkers around the world. Like my first event that I landed with was David Frum. And then shortly after we had Tariq Ali, and then Yanis Varoufakis. And so this series that had enormous momentum, a lot of appetite. So it's really good to be part of that initiative. There's a couple of specific memories, I think are worth sharing. And so, just to tell you a little bit, I wasn't stuck only in producing that series because as I continued to curate that series, I was offered the opportunity to also start curating literary programs and just cultural programs in general. So that expanded to me doing the Black History Month series, the Indigenous Celebration series, Asian heritage series, and basically a lot of thematic interesting series that the library was doing and Canadian literature. So it gave me like this wide breadth of how to program for a variety of audiences, and how to work with different types of partners.
Two fun things to share that are like, I'll never forget these two. The first one was, in February 2019, the Glenn Gould foundation told us, told me or my boss at the time that they were bringing Jessye Norman, the great Jessye Norman, the most famous black opera singer to Toronto to give her an award. And so they were wondering if we would be interested in doing something with her, because they were doing like some fancy glitzy event with her, but it'd be nice to have something more for the public and accessible. So I immediately jumped on the opportunity and decided to curate together with my team, a whole symposium called Black opera. And the idea of the symposium was to explore issues like cultural appropriation in the opera and the use of blackface, to bring in people to talk about why opera is such a unique and different genre, how black creators, singers and musicians have been a part of it. But also to have performances. So we rolled in a grand piano into the library, which was the most difficult logistical thing I've ever done. Because putting in a piano through elevators and corridors are not designed for pianos, it's quite the challenge. And we ended up having three performances with all Black opera singers Glenn Gould foundation brought in but also from the Harlem Opera Theatre. We brought this group from Harlem, they sang and then Jessye Norman, to cap or to end the whole symposium. She had this beautiful, wonderful interview with Eleanor Wachtel from CBC books. And that ended up being I think, her last interview, because she passed away, maybe a month after that interview. So it was one of her last, if not the very last public appearance that Jessye Norman had, we got to enjoy that. People can listen to that interview online, it's on CBC books. If you look up Eleanor Wachtel and Jessye Norman, it's up there on the internet. That was incredibly rewarding. The second memory that I want to share: On Civil Society was doing really well as a series. And so I got invited to curate the whole stage or the library got invited to curate a stage at the Word on the street festival, which is one of the big literary festivals in Toronto. And Word on the Street, you know, was probably expecting us to curate a series of literary programs. And I realized, wait a minute, if the whole festival is about literature, and everyone else is doing literary things, why don't we just focus this on civil society stuff, and at the time, the Cambridge Analytica scandal had just happened. So like, this is a right moment, to talk about how big tech is destroying democracy and destroying our trust in institutions. And I realized, well, I want to do a whole symposium or take over the whole stage and do a whole day of talks about big tech and democracy and how algorithms are disrupting social justice, how they're invading our privacy. But I realized one key thing to do here is that most tech panels and most tech conversations are full of white dudes, it's basically panels of white men. And so how do I not do that? And so I ended up finding that some of the most interesting scholars and critics and people who are writing about big tech and what's happening in our world, happened to be women and women of color. And so we ended up having of the eight panelists, seven of them were women, it was this really rich experience. And the most beautiful lesson for me, and I'll end with this is that it was a glorious, sunny Saturday in September, I think was September 21. Sunny, no one in Toronto wants to be indoors when it's sunny in September. And it was also in a weird part of town in Harbourfront centre, which, like, no one lives around there. So it's hard to get to, and yet the place was packed the whole day. So something resonated. And that was a very rewarding thing to know, as a programmer, when you put something on and you believe in it, but you don't know if other people are going to care about it. And then it was full, it was very exciting.
Am Johal 14:41
That's true. If you're a programmer, you have to take risks, you have to take risks. Otherwise, you know, what are you doing? You know, one of the things you learn as a programmer is that audiences are diverse and complicated. And say, you're doing programming around the unruliness of democracy and all of these different distortions that come with the times. And I'm wondering, what have you learned about audiences that you're programming for in the various contexts that you've been working in this area, in terms of doing public programming?
Jorge Amigo 15:16
You know, my experience has been limited to programming for public libraries. So I think what happens there is that there's already a certain type of audience that pays attention to and cares about what a library is putting on. So I think that the audiences that we get at public library events tend to be well read people who care about social justice, care about equity, care about finding the truth and making the world a better place. So I mean, we do program for a general audience, but I think the audience that comes let's just say it's a very respectful audience, that's the way to put it. It's a very respectful, tends to be. Toronto I did, probably, I don't know, 150 events in two years. And then in Vancouver so far, I've done something like 150. And so, of course, those are 150 audiences. So it's not a singular audience, different events attract different people. But in general, I've learned that I don't have to worry about who shows up. And even if the topic is tricky, I think what I've also learned is that when you curate, or when you program for a difficult subject, that you want to make sure you're not triggering people from the outset. So you don't trigger people with your title or with the description or with the makeup of the panel. And so, to avoid having unpleasant type of confrontational situation in a program, you want to start with a question and inspire people's curiosity about the topic. The title is a question or the way you frame it makes people wonder about a thing. And then the way you curate who you put on the panel for me, I've learned that if, if you balance it in a way that feels fair, but also feels exciting and interesting to people, you tend to not get the kind of, I guess, pushback or backlash that you would expect you have a very one sided or very responsible way of approaching a conversation, if that makes sense.
Am Johal 16:53
Yeah for sure. So you move back to Vancouver to work at the Vancouver Public Library and walked like basically straight into the pandemic context. And wondering if you could share a little bit about how you've approached programming at the VPL. I've been able to attend a few events. It's just, I think you're doing wonderful work there. And it's really enlivening the city to see public programming come back in a central public place, like the VPL.
Jorge Amigo 17:22
Yeah. That's exactly it, you said it really nicely. That's my mission. And on the note of walking into the pandemic, I literally walked into it or drove into the pandemic. I moved from Toronto, I drove across the country with my father the week of March 10 2020. And the pandemic got declared, as we were driving from Thunder Bay to Winnipeg. And we found out about it through the CBC in the car. And you know, the WHO has declared a global pandemic, breaking news. And so as I arrived in Vancouver, everything was shut down. And I showed up for my first day of work at 9am, and got laid off at noon. But that's it- three hours, in the new job that I moved across the country for and that was quite a shock. I was laid off for six months. And then six months later, I started, so I finally got into the job in January 2021. Well, in September 2020, but we didn't start programming until January. And so talking about my approach is tricky. Because I think at the beginning, what I was trying to do is understand the moment and try to understand how do we adapt to the current tricky conditions where everyone is suddenly programming online. And I don't have the ability to just suddenly bring people and gather them in a place. So I think my first instinct was, I need to raise the profile of our programming and immediately get people to pay attention to what we're doing. And so from the start, I wanted to start programming some high profile authors or bringing people that people would start or that the audience would start paying attention and realizing that there was a good lineup here to pay attention to. Question that I started with here was how do we turn VPL into an exciting go to place for arts, exhibition .cultural events, that aligns with the city's mission of being an informed, engaged and connected city? And so to me, the answer was just I wanted to curate high profile events, exhibitions, performances that are open and accessible to everyone. And as you said, that made people come back to these public places, and see the central library and the libraries in general, but beautiful building, as a place where you can go in any day, and encounter an exciting performance, an exciting talk, learn something new about the world. That was the general idea. And I guess I think what I've been trying to do is to lean heavily on my relationships that I built in Toronto with publishers and with authors and with just thinkers, and try to bring that to Vancouver.
So that one way that I've approached it is to really, really lean on what is out there beyond Vancouver. And then here on the ground in Vancouver to listen to what the community needs here. And what is particular topics that matter in Vancouver, I think programming for Toronto is very different from programming in Vancouver. People here have different conversations that they're really in tune with. And so doing that combination of leaning on what I learned in Toronto and those relationships and listening to here, I started to just launch programs, author talks and partnerships, partnerships have been a really key way of bringing local content into our spaces. So I know I've talked very abstractly, but I can be a little more specific or give you a sense of some of the partnerships. For instance, I want to bring music into the library. And I feel like we have this opportunity to make music more accessible to anyone who maybe cannot afford to go to a music venue or doesn't have the background to know where to look for music. So for instance, we did a partnership with the Vancouver Opera, and we just launched a series called Opera Adventures. And the idea is that every time the Vancouver opera has a new production, which happens three times a year, they do free performance at the library beforehand. And that performance is not a full opera performance because we don't have the venue or the capacity or the space or people might not know how to even appreciate two hours of opera, but it's a about giving people a taste of it. Some beautiful singing that fills the space, but also giving people a didactic experience. So there's always someone explaining what this opera is about, the history of it, why it matters, maybe explaining a little bit about what the singers are doing, why a tenor is different from a soprano, that kind of thing. So that's a model that I want to continue doing with other arts organizations in partnership. We've hosted a couple of PuSh festival shows, two mural festival exhibitions, I did a whole series with a Latin American Cultural Center about exploring racism in Latin America, a couple exhibitions with different groups that were passing by town, like, for instance, there was a group called the Sixties Scoop Indigenous Society of Alberta. And they have this traveling exhibition. So we offered to host it at the central library and extended for three days to talk about the 60s Scoop, that's been a wonderful experience. That's the overall approach. There's a series that we launched that I'm very proud of called Uplift Asian. And that exemplifies this idea of listening on the ground and and kind of being reactive to what's happening in our own city. And so the wave of anti Asian racism exploded last year, and everyone was talking about it, I realized that we had a responsibility to do something about it as a public institution. So I applied for a grant, got money from the federal government to launch a series of programs to explore this wave of anti Asian racism and try to push back against it by centering Asian voices from the variety of Asian diasporas and communities in the city. So Uplift Asian is the series that we landed on. And we had an advisory group that informed us on how to program it, but also what topics would be interesting to various Asian communities. And so we ended up doing 12 events, I was aiming for five, we ended up doing 12, because I got very excited through the whole event last year. And the good news is that it was a very successful series. And we're going to repeat it again this year. And this year, I have funding again, we're doing six events. So that's been my overall approach.
Am Johal 22:37
You sound like so many programmers I know because it's sort of like it's the risk taking and then 100 ideas simultaneously. And you probably have only scratched the surface of what you want to do in this role. I wanted to come back to this question of, I think of you as an urbanist, even if you're not necessarily trained as one, because every time I run into you, you have some new take on the city or what it's going through. And you think about urban and class issues, the housing situation, all of those kinds of things. And I'm teaching a class on friendship and community right now at SFU, where we're going through many of the same things coming through political theory and other things and wondering how you think about the difference between Mexico City and Vancouver and how you code switch between places, because clearly you have a love for the city you grew up in. But also, you're bringing that here as well, and how you try to build community in the context that you're working in programming, but also in other ways?
Jorge Amigo 23:38
Yeah, that's a huge question. And I really appreciate that you see me as an urbanist, because I will wear that very proudly, because I am constantly thinking about things from an urban perspective. I'm constantly thinking about how our built environment and the shape of our city affects everything we do. And I think it's really important to use that lens always. Because yeah, I'll be very clear, I think our urban landscape sucks. I think that Vancouver has a city that has bad urbanism, because there's not enough public spaces that make us feel connected. I feel that as Uytae Lee's talked about in that YouTube video that's gone viral, we have these public spaces that are kind of designed for loneliness, like the seawall is a place to go from A to B, wearing spandex or walking your dog, but it's not a place to collide with each other. And I think we need more places where we can collide with each other, and where we can get to meet each other and know each other. Places that allow us to look inward, look at each other, spend time meeting neighbors where you don't have to plan a date with your friends to see them, you just know that you go to that plaza and there will be there. So thankfully, the pandemic has allowed us to realize the problem, when in a very dramatic way. And the city has, you know, installed a bunch of parklets that I think, have been a saving grace for me the last two years, like I spent so much time in these public places, because that's where I get to meet neighbors and people and you sit there and there's nothing I mean, you don't have to plan to bump into people to be there. So I think yes, I do. I do think that that's an impediment in Vancouver from meeting people. I think the city is not dense enough. There's not enough density in most places for you to feel like you're constantly meeting people or that there's an opportunity to collide with others. So I feel like from that perspective, I mean, I live in the West End, which is a very dense place. But the density isn't so... what I mean by there's not enough density is that we don't have a plaza where there's always a lot of people sitting around and hanging out. There's Davie and Denman, which are very unsatisfying public spaces because there's small sidewalks where you're mostly going north or south or east or west, but you're not staying on Davey. You're not staying on Denman. Just like you're not staying on Commercial Drive. You're not sitting on Main Street, you're kind of passing by. And that stunts our ability to build community and to talk to each other. And so that's my overall criticism of the city. Like we turned it over to cars and cars rule our space. And that affects everything, affects friendships, affects our ability to be spontaneous with each other.
And so when you talk about, you asked me about the connection between Mexico City and here, I think there's two layers. One is definitely the urbanism. Like a lot of my friends from Vancouver are going to Mexico City all the time, they love it, just like people go to other global cities. And part of the reason they love it is because of all the plazas and parks and ability to be outside and just collide with people and have great interactions in public. And the amount of arts and culture of course. And I think the other thing that I found is tricky here is, Am, feel free to jump in and interrupt me at any point. And, you know, ask me to deepen anything. But I want to be careful not to romanticize Mexico City, because I left when I was 25 years old, so and I'm 41 years old now. So that means that I didn't spend most of my adult years building friendships in Mexico City. So I don't have like a perfect comparison. But I do know what it feels like to have Mexican friends— I have friends from Mexico and Mexican friends here. And I do know what it feels like to connect with people when I go back and visit. And it feels vastly different. Vastly different. I feel like in my country, and in other places, I would say Toronto is like this too, Montreal is like this too, people are on a project of adding new friendships to their lives. It's a constant addition projects, people are constantly wanting to add. Whereas in Vancouver, I feel like people are not that interested in constantly expanding their community and their circles, I feel like what I felt in Vancouver, and when I talked to friends, people have a limited number of space for friendships, they have their set five friends, and they cannot be convinced to add any more. And one of the obvious things to point out is when you go to a wedding in Mexico, or in India or in other countries, there's 500 people in the wedding, the whole community comes because everyone's your friend, because you genuinely have a connection with all these people. It's part of how we live. I've been to so many weddings in Vancouver, I don't think I've ever counted more than 80 people, people don't care to have enough friends or connections
Am Johal 27:42
Come to Surrey with me, you'll see the 500. I was gonna say when you were talking about public space, there's that quote from I think it's Jean Renoir, the French filmmaker about "all great societies are based on loitering". There's an anti loitering vibe in the city, around people spending time in public space is somehow hurting the city in a particular way. And public space is designed such that it's uncomfortable to be there. I completely agree with you on that front. The aspect of the different desire to have more collisions is definitely something that's necessary. And wanted. I was gonna ask you a little bit about the role of public libraries and public engagement right now. And particularly, coming out of the pandemic, one aspect, but also the physical infrastructure of buildings is one aspect and libraries in terms of how they're doing engagement, there's podcast booths, there's all sorts of other things happening in the virtual realm. But what do you see as sort of some of the novel possibilities of engagement for public libraries in terms of how they inhabit their publicness? And also their role in democratic life?
Jorge Amigo 28:53
Yeah, you don't like small questions, so let's get into it. I think libraries have never been more important. Because we live in an era of mass deception, of disinformation of deep fakes of algorithms who are radicalizing people for profit. And, and we are in an era of hyper capitalism that is just degrading our ability to connect with each other and to have meaningful connection. And so, to me, libraries are this, this anomaly, this socialist anomaly of a public good that just gives you things for free and allows you to connect without having to have any, it's like a non transactional space. And that's very rare. So I think for me, libraries could teach people and can lean on that aspect of libraries, this idea that it's a public good, that serves the public, to help us connect with each other and share ideas in a more open and free space. So I mean, of course, libraries can be a beacon of truth and knowledge, and they're one of the most beloved institutions. But I also think that apart from exposing people to new ideas, we can help people understand the complexity of our world, because there's goodwill and trust in libraries and in librarianship. And so we have a critical role to play in unpacking the complexity of the world and trying to make sense of the conflicts and disagreements that we see around us. And I think we can do that through a variety of ways. Like one of them is through programming, which is my lane. I think our collections do that, that's not my lane, so I can't speak to the depth of that, but and also using our public spaces in a smart way. And, you know, our public spaces, your spaces of gathering and of joy and of experimentation as well. So part of my mission is to make the library very fun and to have a place where people can come gather and meet each other. Either through performances or music or art, conversations, but in general have people come there to do something and to connect with each other. And that lens will always help. The library also has a series, I mean, it leans a lot on innovation in terms of, you know, we have the digital inspiration lab, where you know, people can go play with digital tools, and recordings and learn how to podcast. Those are things that we teach. But yeah, I think that it's important to always remember that we should be ready to completely change our approach. I think that when you work in a big institution, there's a temptation to just let the inertia take over the decisions because you keep doing what you're doing. And what works every season and you keep doing the same series and the same programs and the same initiatives every year, because you've done them once. And they work well, and people continue attending. But I think that to your question, it's important to always be open to changing our approach to both programming, but to services. And to really capitalize on the fact that we have a great network of buildings, where we can roll out a mass new engagement idea or program or initiatives that will geographically affect the whole city. So I think as long as me from a programming perspective, but also my colleagues in other departments are, are thinking of ways to innovate our needs, and I know they are, they're constantly thinking about new ways of inventing our collections and, and the way that we approach services. I think that that's the role.
Am Johal 31:50
Jorge, I was gonna come back to for a moment, what you mentioned about public space. I have a friend who lives in Vancouver now, but is from Rijeka, Croatia. He tells this story about going down to the public square to- you know, leaves the house saying I'm just gonna get a loaf of bread, you go for the loaf of bread, and then you run in it to some friends. Say ah, let's have a beer. Another group of friends comes, you know, you've been sitting there for two to three hours having a beer and another group of friends come by, and all of a sudden, like, things go on and on like that. And then the night goes on. And then all of a sudden, you know, the person comes back with the bread like the next morning at seven in the morning. Like there's something about time, temporality that in a North American capitalist environment, that time is regimented in ways that aren't healthy, in terms of community building.
Jorge Amigo 32:34
Absolutely. So I want to reply to that, because I have so many stories. A good friend of mine sat me down one day, and asked me how deep we wanted our friendship to be. And I was like, what are you talking about? He's like, well, listen, I have time for 15 friends in my life. And so if we're going to invest in this friendship, I just need to know that you want to be one of those 15. Because otherwise, you know, it's fine. It's like no hard feelings, but I'll just spend that time investing on another person to be my 15th friend. And I was like, what are you-? And so but this is not a rare thing, I've experienced this in maybe not as explicitly as someone openly telling me about it. But I feel that many times friendships and connections here are very transactional, I feel like I'm being scheduled as if I was scheduled into a work meeting to hang out, and they get 30 minutes of Jorge every month. And our friendship is the 30 minutes that they get to see me every month. And that's it. And so there's almost like this aversion to deepening friendship and to getting to know you. And one of the main ways I've experienced this is like, I go to a lot of art openings and a lot of art shows in the city. And I think they're a really good way to meet people that have similar interest to me, because I care about those things. Like, if you're at an art opening at a random gallery on a Thursday night, instead of I don't know, like, going to a soccer game or playing hockey or something, there's a good chance that you have a lot in common with a person that you just ran into at the gallery. And so the example that I'll give you is like in Vancouver, I have people who I meet up, I see at art galleries all the time, where we have conversations there, but it's never gone beyond that, it just stays that they're the acquaintances that I see in that kind of space. Whereas I have a very good memory of in Toronto, I went to an opening at a gallery, started chatting with these two people. And then they said, hey, let's connect. And in Vancouver, the conversation usually is around like, hey, let's connect. We can't this weekend because we have a barbecue, but maybe next weekend. And in Toronto, the conversation was like, oh, we have a barbecue this weekend. And they see that as like, oh, come, come and bring your friends. That's an opportunity for us to bring you into our circle and to add you to our friend group. And then you know, it's up to us to figure out what we do with that. Yeah, what you said resonates with me in the sense that sometimes friendships and relationships feel like time is a constraint. But also there's this, this aversion two just being a little bit more spontaneous with them.
Am Johal 34:45
Jorge, so in terms of public programming at the VPL, what are you excited about? Or, you know, who are some of the dream people you'd like to bring in to the city?
Jorge Amigo 34:56
Wow, that's a good question. I'm excited about a few things I'm always planning new initiatives. I'm always excited about what's coming. But um, well, the first thing I already mentioned this, but I'm excited about the Uplift Asian series starting again in April and May, because I think it's nice to repeat something that worked well and bring new authors. I'm also looking forward to, so one thing that happened in November is that we hosted a small public workshop slash concert where we brought five marimbas into the library, percussions into the main atrium of the library to test some sound and the idea- it's a long story, but essentially, there's this composer in town whose amazing. And his name's Jordan and he runs a thing called Redshift society. And he's been- he has done these things called vertical orchestras at the library, where he fills the atrium with music. And so they haven't happened since the pandemic and so he reached out, he wants to do them again. And seeing how people reacted to having- to encountering music in that beautiful space made me really excited about the possibility of turning the atrium of the library or the library in general into a music venue. I realized that I work in one of the biggest music venues in the city that nobody sees as a music venue. And so yes, of course, the sound is weird. There's a lot of echo, there's a lot of reverb in that space. But with some creativity and some really good curation, I think we can start curating a series of concerts there, that might be free. So this sneak peek that is not public or anything yet, but fine I can share, is that I want to do a series, I'm dreaming of something called 'closing time'. The library on Fridays closes at 6pm. And so I was thinking that if we did a concert every Friday or every other Friday that started 5pm, and went to six, like that last hour of the day, people around the library in downtown can come after work and just enjoy a free public concert in the space. People who are in the library studying will suddenly realize, wow, this place is full of music, and they can just go out and enjoy it. People who were leaving the library anyway, will have to cross the concert anyway. So we have like a built in audience. But also we're in a place geographically where we could potentially start attracting people from outside, from hotels around us to come and know that on Fridays, there's this amazing free experimental music concert happening every Friday or every other Friday in the library. So this is just an idea that just came into my head a few weeks ago. And I've been starting to talk to organizations that curate music in the city and musicians and people try to understand how we can make this work. What is the funding model? How do I pay people for it? How do I find grants for it? But also, how do we curate this, I'm not a music curators per se. So I want to figure out how do we maybe do some sort of distributed curation model where I can lean on the expertise of other curators so that they bring in talent that needs a stage and is maybe looking for a place to perform.
Am Johal 37:39
Once you program you can program anything you want. It's... anything you'd like to add, Jorge?
Jorge Amigo 37:46
We got into a critique of Vancouver and you know my fun thoughts about why it's hard to connect with people here. And I think it's important to also close on a positive note. Because I don't want that to feel like I dislike- I like living here, I really care about the friends and the community here. And I think that the positive note to say is that we have work to do. These are problems we can fix, we can make our public spaces better, we can learn how to be more open to other people. And I think a lot of it has to do with just increasing our chances of spontaneous collisions in the city. Perhaps we can't change some parts about the culture of how people connect. But we can change things about the physical aspect of how people are forced to connect and encounter others. And I think that will slowly help us with connecting. And the other positive note that I think is important to bring up is what's been beautiful about being back in Vancouver after spending that time in Toronto is realizing the amount of incredible cultural institutions and cultural leaders, arts and cultural leaders working to make this place incredible and to you know, bringing in wonderful talent to the city. So full disclosure, I'm on the board of the PuSH festival. I'm also on the board of the Indian Summer Arts Society, which was Indian Summer festival. And I joined those boards because I was inspired and excited to realize or to see the kind of work they're curating and the kinds of voices they're trying to bring into the city and how they're trying to reshape the culture of hospitality here. I think in your last interview with Sirish, he was talking about radical hospitality. And that really resonated with me, this idea that I think some of the institutions that are doing the best work here are institutions that are just fully opening up the doors to welcome people in to learn and to experience things like the Latin American Cultural Center, the VLACC is just doing incredible programming and trying to build a cultural center and build new conversations around what it means to be Latin American in Vancouver and that's an energy that was not there when I lived here before Toronto and, and I'm excited to be part of that and to... We're in a very exciting moment in the city. We're emerging from pandemic lockdowns with a renewed sense of the importance of getting together, a renewed sense of the importance of having better public spaces. And all I see around me are amazing leaders and institutions that are going to make that happen that are going to constantly... I'm very impressed by the ideas and inspired by what I see around me as a as an ecosystem of people trying to make the place more exciting.
Am Johal 40:01
Jorge, thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar. And thank you for bringing your generosity of spirit into your public programming and your daily collisions. Vancouver definitely needs a heightened degree of porosity, to build community and friendships. So thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar.
Jorge Amigo 40:20
Such a pleasure to chat with you. Thank you for having me. And people can talk to me anytime. I'm on Twitter and I reply and on Instagram or whatever. So I'm, I'm always happy to have these conversations with folks and it's my favorite thing in the world is to go and sit with a stranger and talk and get to know them and, you know, learn new things.
Am Johal 40:36
And go see the fabulous public programming at the Vancouver Public Library.
Kathy Feng 40:43
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to our episode with Jorge Amigo! Check the resources in our show notes to learn more about some of the programs and organisations Jorge mentioned. Don’t forget to subscribe on your podcast listening app of choice and we’ll catch you next time on Below the Radar.