“Life is, in itself and forever, shipwreck.”
So wrote the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset in 1925. “To be shipwrecked is not to drown,” he continued. When humans are sinking into the abyss, they move their arms to stay afloat. That swimming stroke, for Ortega, is akin to culture – a reaction against one’s own destruction.
At the opening of Shipwreck on April 11, UKAI Projects’ Jerrold McGrath invoked Ortega as he introduced the exhibit.
“The invitation at least for us is figuring out how to swim again,” McGrath told the crowd gathered in the atrium on the 11th floor of the EV building, “as we find ourselves increasingly in unsettled waters.”
The kinds of cultural production that interest UKAI, McGrath noted, are not those that fetishize the author, speak only to themselves, or stand at a lofty critical distance.
“We need to find other ways of providing examples,” McGrath said, before he was interrupted by laughter from around the corner. A group of attendees were joking amongst themselves by the Milieux kitchen. “I kinda wanna be in there now,” McGrath ad-libbed, and the rest of the room laughed too.
That interruption established the tone of inquiry for the exhibit: one serious in its aims, but playful and spontaneous in its process.
A burst of laughter from around the corner was just part of Shipwreck’s swimming stroke – one intervention into the “terrain of uncertain governance,” as McGrath called it.
After McGrath’s speech, the crowd dispersed, under the invitation to find a work — or a person — to play with in the exhibit.
This opening marked the final phase in Shipwreck’s participatory process. First, the UKAI team brought their own works into the Milieux space; secondly, three local artists added contributions to it; and now, the Milieux community and the public were invited to make their marks on the evolving works.
I wandered amidst the conversations and interventions. Grabbing a plate of food and a glass of wine, I made my way to the Resource Room, where the Machine Agencies folks had added several AI contributions since I’d last been there.
I watched as a group of guys gleefully yelled into a microphone, which appeared to be feeding their words into a display screen, where they were being translated into visuals. A couple of them shouted “Hochelaga!!!” as an instruction for the visual interpreter, titled Mechanical Meanderings by François Lespinasse. They clapped each other on the back, cheering as I watched on.
I said hello to a few Communications PhD students, who seemed unsure how to engage with the works. I pointed out some found objects on a table, left by artists Gabriel Junqueira Maciel Teixeira and Eija Loponen-Stephenson. I knew the objects were meant to be communal, added to the assemblages that already dotted the room. One of the students picked up some metal wiring and placed it on top of a figurative assemblage: “I’m caging the ballerina,” she laughed.
Veering over to the kitchen, I peered through a viewfinder brought in by Jake Zaslav, Machine Agencies coordinator and Media Studies MA student. The viewfinder featured AI-generated images of what Manhattan’s Delancey Street might look like in the year 2222: lots of clamoring foliage; gas masks and spontaneous fires; and Zaslav playing ping pong.
“Why ping pong?” I asked him, and we both laughed as he improvised a rationale. I had just watched Joan Micklin Silver’s Crossing Delancey, a 1988 rom-com about the historic Jewish immigrant community surrounding the street and the relationship between tradition and modernity. Zaslav’s project worked as a kind of futuristic sequel. Are there matchmakers after the apocalypse?
He introduced me to Jess, a colleague in his program who studies TTRPG games. We talked about Passover and psychoanalysis and PhD programs. Jess, I learned, is especially interested in relationships to play — and the reasons people stop playing as they age.
That question seemed to reverberate through the exhibit, implicit in the initial hesitation of attendees to participate in the works, and the peals of laughter that came after.
As the wine depleted and people started to exit the space, I caught up with McGrath and UKAI’s Luisa Ji. They both had a reflective demeanour. The Shipwreck residency is UKAI’s final project for the time being, as the team is pulled in different directions.
“I was anxious when people started to come in because they didn’t know how to engage,” McGrath told me. “When you don’t know what to do, you critique.”
Once the invitation was made, though, he noticed the energy shift. “There’s dozens of poems and works and offerings.”
Ji mentioned that the work she brought in, a display of gelatinous creatures who washed up on the shipwreck shore, had been transformed.
“Mine got turned into a one night in Montreal shrine,” she said wryly. I hadn’t even noticed — on the display case first used for the creatures, now there was a cigarette butt, receipts from Grumpy’s, a lactose pill, and a key that doesn’t work.
Ji’s creatures were originally conceptualized as a form of currency. But the work had become a different kind of currency: items exchanged to say, ‘I belong here, I know this place.’
“I like that people took a lot of this as a light-hearted joke,” she added.
Shipwreck is ripe for light-hearted engagement, but underneath the project’s surface there’s a deep sense of foreboding. The residency asks participants to consider a world in crisis: how do we adapt? What tools are at our disposal? Laughter is often understood as a coping mechanism, but it’s also a sign of creativity. Humour turns its objects on their sides to understand them anew.
That kind of inquiry is crucial in a landscape that is being literally remade by the climate crisis. Shipwreck is not just about preparing for disasters to come; myriad challenges are already here.
In post-secondary education, universities face dire funding cuts and authoritarian attempts to silence critical thinking. The contemporary university is a flashpoint for social movements — from the Vietnam War demonstrations of the 1960s to last year’s student encampments for Palestine — and their suppression. Bringing Shipwreck into the university setting poses problems that are particular to this space. There are limits to what can be disrupted here.
That was part of the fun for McGrath, as elucidated in his opening speech. “What happens when we place in the middle of an institution ostensibly committed to creation this kind of interruption?” he asked the crowd. “It’s been fascinating for ten days to watch people come in, look around, and respond. And what do you think that response often is? ‘What the fuck.’”
If university settings can be rigid and rule-bound, Shipwreck is about chafing at restriction, flipping the furniture on its side. Milieux was in some ways a natural home for this kind of project, an already porous institute that doesn’t fit neatly in one framework.
On my way out of the building, I picked up a sharpie and scribbled a fish on the windows, next to artist Meghan Moe Beitiks’s swirling designs and anonymous texts that had been added during the event.
“I’d rather be laughing,” I wrote under the fish, before taking my leave from Shipwreck’s quiet harbour, into the night beyond.
– Rosie Long Decter, Milieux Storyteller
