Josh Schwebel <privatejosh@gmail.com>
To: Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte <████████████████████ >
dear Mariane,
I hope that summer is treating you well.
I am writing for a couple reasons bearing on The Employee project (sorry for the long message).
First, I am at work on a first-person narrative describing the context in which the work was created, and I find myself making a couple of potentially unfounded claims about CCA's policies.
Do you have a tip for where I could find accurate references for this information?
Here is the first statement:
Is this true?? Do you know, offhand, where I can find the statistical or financial support for this claim?"Even as the election of liberal government in 2015 yielded a hard-won increase in arts funding and an overhaul of the funding categories at the Canada Council for the Arts, increases were not evenly distributed across funding streams. Funding increases primarily were allocated to streams supporting one-off projects, while streams for operating funds remained as scarce as before".
The second one is similar:
Since when has CAC only funded up to 70% of operating costs? I thought it was since around 2015 when they restructured into the ridiculously named streams, but I could be wrong. Do you know this off the top of your head?"In fact, since funding restructuring (when?) any one arts council funder will only cover operating costs up to 70%, with the acceptance of the grant contingent on the beneficiary centre obtaining the remaining costs from other funding sources, be those through private sponsorships, fundraising events, or other levels of public funding (such as regional or provincial funders)"
Sorry to inundate you with questions, but if you know where I could look to find this information, it would be terrifically helpful.
Now, the second thing I would like to address is a bit more sensitive, and has to do with the material I would hope to publish, and how my reflections and framing of the project has shifted. This past winter, I was in the midst of trying to organize the material I had gathered from The Employee, while also trying to assemble authors for the publication. In fact, I was getting few responses on either front. Most people around me were totally burnt out, and struggling to remain responsive. I realized that this is exactly a symptom of our incapacity to properly set boundaries around our work, and a result of the constant overwork pre-pandemic that had tipped over into exhaustion during the pandemic. I also realized that the waves of these collapses were not external to my project, and even as I had been bracing up against one potential collapse through the action of the work, I was witnessing and passively recording multiple others.
So over the past few months I have been downloading and organizing an archive of all of the personal-professional emails connected to the project. These include our own emails, as well as emails between myself and other project contributors. I think that this archive captures the overlap between art-work-life that is our current state, and also extends towards admissions of in- or dis-ability that we need to learn from and restructure around.
I hope to publish these online, on a website-archive paired with the printed book. I do not wish to go against anyone's consent, however, and hope to approach this sensitively. The point of this is not to burn my friendships, but to expand and apply the work and its affects into the lived context, and for that reason it makes sense, however it is essential to me to respect my collaborators' boundaries.
The emails appended below are the exact content of our exchanges (although it may expand into the future to include further emails towards the publication process). I am able to redact these documents according to your level of comfort. That could mean not publishing your side at all, or blurring out certain information that you wish to remain private. Please let me know what you would be comfortable releasing into the archive. Keep in mind that I have approximately 1500 individual emails, and I think it highly unlikely that many people will want to read these closely, so the greater likelihood is that they will be lost in the crowd.
sending you my warmest wishes,
gratefully and with love,
Josh
