Confronting culture

karen herland

A group of Concordia students and recent grads are figuring out how to confront big business’s excesses while raising the necessary finances for their own campaigns. It is not always easy to challenge the mainstream while also paying rent or salaries.

Überculture was started on campus three years ago by Ezra Winton and Rob Maguire. They shared a concern about “the commercialization of public space and a desire to combat the corporatization of culture,” Winton said.

Both had served as presidents of the Concordia chapter of Amnesty International. They found the focus on government human rights abuses ignored the increasing responsibility of multinational corporations for violations around the world. Although Amnesty now addresses some of those issues, überculture was developed to fill the void.

“We wanted to promote a culture that was more humane and strong enough to resist mainstream culture,” Winton said.

The group took shape based on the interests of its members. Recent campaigns have included promoting independent media and fair trade coffee.

Winton had developed a film series showcasing politically engaged documentaries six years ago as an undergrad at Langara College in Vancouver. Cinema Politica migrated with him and settled under the überculture banner.

Überculture organized two tours across Canada to towns battling the presence of Wal-Mart. Those experiences were recorded and will be released as a full-length video, Wal-Town, later this year.

The campus group, which attracts just over a dozen people to its weekly meetings, is currently experiencing growing pains. Maguire graduated and established an off-campus Montreal chapter of the group, with offices on Park Ave. Another has formed in Halifax.

Like-minded individuals are encouraged to organize similar campaigns, or local versions of Cinema Politica across the country. Communications officer Jeremy Loveday sees the expansion to off-campus groups as an opportunity to develop more campaigns.

A donation which helped get the Montreal chapter off the ground has run out. To subsidize activities, überbru beer is being sold in Montreal and Vancouver.

Can an organization maintain an anti-corporate critique as it expands using a franchise model and sustains itself with beer sales? Winton is aware of the contradictions, but pragmatic about the circumstances.

“We’re in a constant state of bankruptcy and too political to get government funding.” Public funding also comes with a set of strings attached.

Überculture is currently in a funding drive, which so far has collected only a fraction of the $20,000 they hope to raise. A mailout is being planned. Meanwhile, there are beer sales, a move that recently got them into the pages of Toronto’s THIS Magazine and the Globe and Mail.

Winton said that überbru is brewed in two small breweries: One in B.C., the other Montreal. “It’s a product that doesn’t create waste, that is all natural and that leaves a small ecological footprint.” Because it is brewed close to where it is sold, the pollution associated with transportation is also kept to a minimum.

The tensions of critiquing a mainstream culture while operating within it were also brought home recently when Loveday was one of a handful of candidates with ties to überculture who ran under the Conscious banner, during the recent Concordia student elections.

Meanwhile Winton, who has also been a student spokesperson for the university’s Community Campaign, ran for president of the Graduate Student Association. Neither was successful, though students did pass a referendum that pledged two cents per credit to bring panelists, or the filmmakers themselves, in for Cinema Politica screenings.

“It’s hard to fight the fight, you have to join in at a certain level,” Winton said. More information is available at www.uberculture.org