VPW, a community-access television station in Winnipeg, Manitoba, hosted an array of programming ranging from the pragmatic to the truly bizarre, from 1971 until the station was bought out and dismantled in 2001. Grassroots media does not have the same institutional and archival frameworks as its mainstream counterpart; its losses often go unremarked, or must be reconstituted and memorialized in improvisational, provisional ways. In recent years, several Winnipeg artists have begun a kind of reclamation project around the station. This paper considers the various threads of nostalgia, political economy, and decline narratives at work in VPW's reclamation. It argues that thinking about why certain things are celebrated and others thrown away is itself a problem of aesthetics, politics, and publics. It examines why certain shows are remembered and others not, and the role of unanticipated uses of public infrastructure in such a dynamic.

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