In the beginning, the main problem was that municipalities refused to exhibit public art, but now, they are more open to that. They have even loosened certain rules. In the beginning, our works were considered like billposting, and municipal regulations had to be changed.
Ten years later, there is a demand, population asks for these. We also have to operate with revenue of $400,000, $500,000 or $600,000. Our funding is granted per project. We don't receive operational funding from the Conseil des arts et des lettres of Quebec, nor from the Canada Council for the Arts. Our operational funding is only $5,000. We feel this makes our projects more precarious.
We have a lot of support and the projects are going well, but it's as though we never managed to obtain operational subsidies because envelopes were saturated. That is changing a bit, and we are going to try to take advantage of it.
We are forced to manage our organization somewhat like a business, to the extent that we cannot depend entirely on subsidies, and so we create projects and partnerships. This makes us fairly dynamic in our search for funding. Operational funding is what we lack the most.
There's also the new location where as creators, we want to get together to create things together. The city of Quebec is renovating the building to bring it up to code — at a cost of about a million dollars — and we are the tenants. It's an empty envelope. There will also have to be an installation phase.
We have reached the point where it can really become a dynamic location and where we will really be able to take our place, and expand in the ecosystem of the environment.