CELEBRATING BICYCLE ARTISANS
Right to Move/La Voie Libre and Cyclo Nord-Sud are
proud to invite you to the first Montreal Artistic
Bicycle Exposition. You will have the opportunity to
meet some of the most talented bicycle frame builders
from Québec and Ontario, passionate people for whom a
bicycle is more than a mean of transportation: it's
also a piece of art!
Saturday, April 19th - 12 to 7 pm
Sunday, April 20th - 12 to 4 pm
The Cyclo Nord-Sud Warehouse
7235, Saint-Urbain Montréal
Métro De Castelnau
www.cyclonordsud.org
Entrance free, donation suggested. All profits
generated from the event go to Cyclo Nord-Sud
The fund raising event is organized by Right to
Move/La Voie Libre, Montreal's community
not-for-profit bicycle repair shop, in solidarity with
Cyclo Nord-Sud.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Hello Montreal Bikers,
Anyone interested in biking and art should check out SOS Velo, an extraordinary non-profit org located at 2o85 Bennet. They recycle people through the recycling of bicycles. That is, they give a chance to people lacking skills, confidence, or opportunity to work for them and learn how to refurbish bicycles.
CUTV nooze (Concordia University Television) recently interviewed te general manager. You can watch the interview at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSisHeJQJOg
and visit the SOS velo site at:
http://sosvelo.ca/site/index.ntd
Stay tuned to CUTV nooze as well (you can just find them on Youtube) as they are planning a series of short mini-docs on biking in Montreal.
Let's get biking!!!!
Mel Gallant
Let's get biking.
To my knowledge, and from a source “in the know” in the Montreal bike scene:
SOS Velo makes cheap, cheap recycled bikes with the worst parts available. The bikes are painted attractive colors and then resold. It is actually illegal to paint over a brand on a bike and put your brand on it (such as they do, putting "eco velo" on all their bikes.)
Furthermore the bikes are sold at a huge profit: they are generally over $200 and cost nothing to put together, as they are donated bikes, assembled by volunteers. This is not to be negative, just to be aware of certain "false alternatives” that pose as soothers of our bourgeois guilt, all the while turning a big buck. SOS VELO is first a business, which is in itself not a bad thing, as long as it's not posing as something its not, which unfortunately it seems it is.
People who love bikes, love quality in bikes, and can't be cheated by paint and gimmicky tricks.
Cycling is more than "the vanguard of the green industry” or a luxurious lifestyle for the elite alternative crowd, or even worse still, a place for hucksters and business sharks to make money.
No,
cycling is a beautiful expression of freedom, ingenuity, and poetic design.
It is free from labels in fact
People who love bikes, just love bikes.
No need for a scene, or a tribal identity forming around it.
What we need in Montreal is people with more real knowledge about bikes and with less of a predatory business modal attached to their ventures. Anyone who saw the turning of outdoor camping co-ops of the seventies, into business giants and fully charged capitalist ventures ten years later- looks with a wary eye at these so called non for profit organizations and co-ops forming around bikes.
And then there’s the media:
The unfortunate problem with media is evident in the above posting, it is, often times, in the end, even under good intentions, a tool to obscure the truth of the matter, not to elucidate it.
"..cycling is a beautiful expression of freedom, ingenuity, and poetic design...." Amen to that.
Gerry :)
Post a Comment