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If you found yourself shipwrecked and washed ashore, what three things would you most wish to have with you? How would you make a new home where you beached?
Join us on April 9 and April 10 and engage with Shipwreck, a durational work under development by UKAI Projects at Milieux Institute. This immersive and interactive experience explores the powerful act of making home amidst the ruins of potential futures, exploring how we navigate ecological, cultural, and technological devastation.
From April 6-9 three Montreal-based artists (see their profiles below) invited by UKAI Projects will be tasked to make a home among remnants brought by their team. Now, it’s your turn to engage with the work. We call all Milieux members and the broader Concordia community to join us and explore how we can rebuild a future collectively. As the three artists finalize their intervention, we invite you all to walkthrough the installation and interact with their work. You’ll have until the next day, April 10, 5 PM to intervene.
April 9: 3-5 PM
Walkthrough and meet Moe, Gabriel and Eija, the three Montreal-based artists in residence.
April 10: Call out to the Milieux Community
You are invited to add, rearrange, and respond to the artists’ work. What does “rebuilding” mean to you? How your work/research resonates with Shipwreck?
A public opening of Shipwreck will happen on April 11 and 12. More informations here.
SHIPWRECK CONCEPTS & THEMES:
Shipwreck refuses nostalgia and embraces the aesthetics of impossibility—an acknowledgment that some ecological realities defy full representation or comprehension. This project borrows from mutual aid, commoning, and craft as a survival practice, understanding that culture is built not in ideal conditions but in adaptive, emergent responses to crisis.
Shipwreck does not mourn the past or rebuild the future—it works in the already-present, in the detritus of histories, technologies, and ecologies. It takes inspiration from the Already-AI Commons, the entanglement of human and non-human agencies, and the latent potential in what has been cast aside. Participants are invited to work with materials that have been displaced or discarded, to engage with emergent properties rather than fixed intentions.
The project layers deep time with contemporary crises. Just as cave drawings in the distant past gesture toward a way of being that is now illegible to us, Shipwreck asks artists to gesture forward—to create conditions that a future observer might find equally opaque yet strangely compelling.
Rather than imposing narratives, artists will work within constraints, treating materials and artifacts as quasi-agents in their own right. The work will evolve not as simulation, but as participation—as an open-ended engagement with a shared cultural and ecological crisis.
Three artists from UKAI Projects will collaborate with three Montreal-based artists to create evolving, participatory scenarios that blur the boundary between creator and audience. The public will be invited to engage with and alter the space, shaping it in ways that resist the idea of authorship as fixed and complete.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Gabriel Junqueira (Fortaleza, Brazil / 1992) is a multimedia artist who explores relations between body, technology and materiality in media such as digital images, sculptures and installations.
His recent research revolves around the relation between built spaces and nature through the creation of landscapes in 3D architectural visualization software, commonly used in the real estate development market to simulate structures to be built.
Seeking inspiration from corporate architecture and landscaping concepts, the artist creates impossible locations, where figurative elements are rearranged to the point of abstraction.
As an extension of his visual arts research, since 2018 he has been dedicated to the musical project “Naves Cilíndricas”. In 2020, he released two albums: “Imagens de Desastres Em High Resolution” on the Meia Vida label and “Névoa” via the Domina Label.
Meghan Moe Beitiks (she/they) is an artist and designer working with associations and disassociations of culture/nature/structure. They analyze perceptions of ecology though the lenses of site, history, emotions, and her own body in order to produce work that analyzes relationships with the non-human.
They were a Fulbright Student Fellow, a recipient of the Claire Rosen and Samuel Edes Foundation Prize for Emerging Artists, a MacDowell Colony fellow, and an Artist-in-Residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. Their work has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada, among other resources. They received their BA in Theater Arts from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and their MFA in Performance Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Eija Loponen-Stephenson‘s work predominantly concerns the relationship between human movement and urban architectural spaces. Through practice-based artistic inquiry and experimental pedagogy, she examines how body-building interactions can reveal hidden power structures programmed into the built environment. She holds a BFA in Sculpture and Installation from the Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD U) and a MA in Art Education at Concordia University.
