🍲 ✨Learning how to receive gifts is equally as crucial as giving gifts. ✨🍲

Dispatch #8 | Luisa Ji | May 1, 2025

What do you do after a shipwreck? Since UKAI Projects wrapped up another iteration of Shipwreck at Milieux Institute a few weeks ago, this question resurfaced for me. For many, especially those without prior experience of past shipwrecks, it sparks fear. I mean, being shipwrecked and washed ashore isn’t a common everyday experience to begin with. 

However, I believe the process of making art and putting yourself in such emotionally vulnerable positions when engaged in a creative process is a practice ground for stress tolerance. The future is scary because we've never seen it before. Uncertainty often derails our plans. Predictions that we rely on, derived from past data, are mere road signs. We still have to walk (or drive, bike, frolic, whatever way you move around) the paths on our own.

Being in a privileged country like Canada often means that most people live relatively peacefully. However, we witness violence and injustices through the internet, filtered through our phone screens. We offload direct experiences to immediate yet abstract stimuli that don’t ask us to extend our views beyond singular issues. To count on a once-every-four-year democratic process for social change is problematic, but normal. Things are always between not that great and good enough. Many responded to volatility by wanting a strong leader who could handle business and defend their property, or call on prescribed authority figures like the police or the city bylaw. Beyond that, they lacked the agency to do something with their immediate community. For all I know, my neighbours will absolutely call the city bylaw on me for things that mildly inconvenience them (though not rule-breaking) before having a conversation directly with me. There are enough security cameras all around me that even though I don't have any installed, a comprehensive view of all my entryways is being monitored at all times, unintentionally, by my overzealous neighbours. Occasionally, they text me that a stranger lurks around the back door or some other neighbour pushes snow onto our shared driveway. Nothing major, but I think "knowing" assures my neighbours that their property is protected. When unable to imagine less abrasive ways of dealing with possible volatility (or minor inconveniences in my case), people opt for the low-hanging fruit—what they see others doing and what they assume to be normal for reasons that everyone is doing it.

Someone commented on my socials about how generative AI produces TV dinner art. I wasn’t sure whether the intention was to anger me or a cry for wanting to be seen and heard. I think there are many reasons why someone eats TV dinner regularly, and more often than not, it’s not a matter of having horrible taste but of being trapped in scarcity. There’s never enough time, money, and energy to keep churning in a hamster wheel that demands endlessly accelerating efficiency. This needs to change. There are always opportunities to start small and nurture this change into something more substantial. We've also lived through times that require us to organize something bigger.

In 2020, as the lockdowns began, many affluent cultural institutions responded by cutting programs, reducing operating hours, and letting go of staff to stay afloat under the crisis. Smaller organizations and art collectives had no options other than closing shop completely, but to keep going. I had the opportunity to work with a few of them. Artists turned over diasporic collaboration networks to support each other, such as PPE distribution, fundraising, making gigs available, and crowd-sourcing dissemination of experimental art forms digitally when more mature platform options aren’t readily available. Artists and arts collaboration networks reach far and are often connected in non-transactional ways. Investing in the arts goes beyond producing works and strengthening national identity—it allows people to experiment with different forms of organizing and be in the practice of caring for each other—these various ways of organizing become useful when the “normal” ways of living are interrupted. Arts and culture enable us to live more beautiful lives, one that asks us to ponder what else is valuable beyond the prescribed influence, power, and wealth. Some obvious ones explored in Goblin Market are care and generosity.

The idea of care being gentle isn’t always a true reflection of what care is. The past months of developing this project together with the artists, care sometimes felt harsh, but they are honest, direct, and with every intention that we get to the other side in one piece. Yes, care can be nursing a broken femur with the support from a community of apes, but care can also be guiding a young bird off a ledge so it ruffles its feathers, spreads its wings to learn to fly—or, in human terms, become your own person, truly as yourself. It was challenging, but in the end, we grew a little bit closer to the gifts we hold as ourselves rather than useful attributes and skillsets expected by others. We don’t truly feel safe until we know we can rely on ourselves first and foremost. We can’t truly be generous if our own hearts haven’t been filled with content. Care and generosity are often framed as giving or doing things for others, but what we tend to forget is that sometimes tending to our own gifts, letting them grow, letting them radiate, makes us capable of care and generosity in the first place. No water can be poured from an empty glass.

Gifts are not to remove money from the exchange process but to serve as a reminder that they bring you joy, and you are free to pass that around once it’s served this purpose for you. Gifts are themselves practices that tell you that you deserve to experience joy, and receiving and appreciating are equally important as giving. A gift cannot find someone who doesn’t know how to receive. I feel that deeply. 

Gifts are also a way of saying “I see you” beyond assigning a label, a role, a task, or a set value for your time. I see you for who you are. Many of us are invited into conversations and decision-making spaces for how we are categorized, so we can show up to represent our broader category, while the majority of our community and their efforts remain unseen. There are very few spaces in the arts and culture sector that recognize “you” as who you are rather than an idea of “your people.” Even the idea of nepotism, which we love to hate in creative fields, or that of tech bros, is an assumption made based on pre-assigned labels. This generalization is unhelpful when our individual experiences of lives lived are vastly different and varied. This extends to normalizing the celebrity artists as charismatic leaders of many invisible helping hands chipping away at their studio, and the starchitects siphoning life from their running rosters of unpaid interns, who are desperate for approval and validation from the industry. Celebrity artists and starchitects are representations of an ideal, idolized, and romanticized version of people (or rather, categories assigned to people) who deserve to be the creative voice of their (again, categories assigned to) community.

Goblin Market has been a gift. Beyond the merchants committed to creating this experience, many travelling merchants arrived at the Goblin Market ready to set up shop. They said hello to the already-settled merchants, offered trades with their art, and found unoccupied corners to unpack their sack of tricks and wares. Over time, more travelling merchants joined in—drawings of mythical creatures, medicinal salves, bones, leather goods, cake, songs… the cacophonous whole. To walk into a space and negotiate to be a part of it takes courage. Many travelling merchants timidly ask me if I would permit their inhabitation of the shared space, to which I answered—“you’d have to go around the room and figure it out. Perhaps speak to all the other merchants.” I’m glad they did stay, set up their shop, and garnered a crowd to share their art with. Many received immediate responses—new trades and all the unexpected relational exchanges that the like button on phone screens cannot replace. 

We welcomed a much more contemplative crowd on our last day in Montreal. Borscht (both the radio and the soup) was served. Artists reminded each other to eat and not wait until they are famished. Guests who lingered for hours emerged from the basement (secret radio emission) hungry and helped themselves with soup before departing. We haven’t yet figured out how to line our pockets with funds to keep doing our weird art, but at least we filled our bellies with warm soup and our hearts with delight and wonder. That’s a good place to start.

I’ve been thinking about The Bear and how Richie’s attitudes towards his personal life took a sharp turn upon experiencing the commitment to make a moment exceptionally special for restaurant guests. How does it relate to art? Artists often discuss their desire to create art that makes people feel something. They commit to their craft, which is essential, but they overlook how to invite others into their world through art. In some ways, Goblin Market made space for artists to explore what happens when the audience is directly participating in their practice rather than being a spectator or a consumer of their finished pieces. Rather than the product, an artistic "object," making people feel something special, artists took the opportunity to create memories with audiences in ways that are intimate. These interactions filled their art with meaning. They are no mere objects anymore. Like the plushie from the claw machine mentioned in a previous dispatch, the audience sees the art with context, situated in moments made magical through the artist's craft and methods of inquiry—an artist's "art" that takes a lifetime to inhabit.

For those of you who wants to see more of Goblin Market activations, here are some ways to start:

Start a gift exchange with your friends.

Host dinner parties.

Go on unplanned picnics in the park and show strangers your sketchbook in exchange for a joke.

Tell people that you appreciate their gifts. 

Be involved in the schemes of the people you care for and care about, even though it’s challenging and inconvenient. Be cringe and unhinged with them.

Start a garden for the love of it, and be ready to take nothing from it at the end.