Good morning. My name is Alexandre Fortin. I am vice-president of the board of directors of Regroupement Pied Carré. We are a non-profit organization that rents out artist studios over four floors in a specific pre-industrial building in Montreal in the Mile End neighbourhood. We have 410 artists and artisans of different kinds, micro businesses, visual artists, dance groups, and various such organizations.
Right now it's an extremely successful project, so 92% to 93% of the spaces are rented out. It's a great success. Our goals are basically to create a space that is affordable, since cost is a problem for many artists, and to create a space where there can be exchanges between disciplines and different kinds of artists. It's also to protect and preserve techniques and cultural hubs for all. We also want to maintain the cultural and artistic aspect of the neighbourhood—Mile End has the highest concentration of artists in Canada per capita. It's also to look for funds to maintain said artist space.
At this point, one of our goals is affordability or to maintain prices that are affordable for artists so they have actual spaces to work in and also to create collaboration and the mixture of different disciplines. Right now we have, yes, galleries, artist studios, collectives, micro businesses, dance studios, artisans, several festival organizations, performance art, and literary arts; and in the last few years, we also have several creative businesses such as Ubisoft, which is a video game company; Framestore, which is a post-production company; Union des Artistes, which is the equivalent of the Screen Actors Guild but in Quebec specifically; and various other businesses. Right now, they decided to choose that particular building, that particular neighbourhood, because of the fact that it was specialized in the creative arts. It had a certain cachet and a certain dynamism, really, so the whole neighbourhood is boiling with creativity, so to speak.
I'll just quickly go over the galleries, because there is the creative hub aspect of the project, but there's also the diffusion and gallery hub of the project. We have the Centre d'art et de diffusion Clark, Atelier Circulaire, Optica, Diagonale, and Dezibao, to name a few. You have textile arts, video arts installations, regular visual arts, electronic music festivals—it's very varied and it's all in the same small spot. The concentration of creativity there is simply amazing.
Right now, some of Pied Carré's long-term goals are to create a better established website—it may seem small, but in terms of interactions between groups, it's of huge importance—have a calendar of events, a very detailed guide of the artists in the project; to create links with the public and with the various organizations; to keep some public spaces open for public activities, conferences, and exchanges between groups and communities; to create those festivals and activities between communities; to create better accessibility to new technologies such as 3-D printing and virtual reality; and also to create a link between various organizations, centres, and such.
Thank you very much.