Shipwreck

We look at drawings on caves and are mystified. We know what they are – animals extant and extinct – but what do they mean? There is a kind of strange joy in inhabiting these alien consciousnesses, constructing meaning through lenses long warped into other shapes.

Might we apply this process in reverse? Might we cast audiences forward into consciousnesses shaped by new realities of climate damage, ubiquitous technologies, and institutional actors unimaginable in their reach and ambitions?

Working with six local artists in Iceland, UKAI will deploy immersive scenarios that provide community members with opportunities to occupy territories of potential devastation in order to surface and make visible the stories and postures necessary to respond. Cultural, social, economic, and environmental crises are terrains of uncertain governance, and we wish to involve audiences in aesthetically constituting their meaning and to participate in the myth-making necessary to occupy a changed world.

This is a multi-phase undertaking that includes research & development (Toronto, April – May 2024), project refinement and presentation (Korpulfsstadir, Iceland, June 2024), presentation at the Carnival of Shipwreck in Fall 2024 (see the bottom of this letter), and subsequent global touring (various locations, post-Fall 2024).

Our lives are soaked with the assumptions of modernity – ideas of progress, disenchantment, and rationalization. We hold to time as a straight line, and innovation is in service to getting to a better future faster. In a world altered ecologically, technologically, and politically, what will become of the shape of time? Where will the boundaries between the individual and the collective be drawn? What forms might re-enchantment take?

Six artists from Canada and an accompanying documentarian will work alongside six artists from Iceland over several weeks to create and evolve scenarios for public occupation and transformation. We will be introducing the artists in the coming weeks.

 The boundary between creator and audience will be elided as works are occupied and altered by community members while creators respond by offering up a range of fragmented and partial glimpses into worlds reconciled to the irreconcilable and somehow finding joy in devastation.

We recoil from the complexities, contradictions, and challenges of ecological crises. Our sense-making tools are inadequate. Shipwreck is an opportunity for creators and communities to step into the overwhelming and begin developing an aesthetic capacity to assemble beauty, harmony, or expression in a changed world.