Shipwreck of Dreams

Shipwreck of Dreams is a collaborative project that reimagines a Swiss wish-granting boat legend, intertwining stories of migration, belonging, community, and solidarity through the journey of a self-organised school shaped by Europe’s borders.

“People would spend days and nights at the lake margins, longing to see the magical ship and have their desires fulfilled,” a forgotten legend once told.

Shipwreck of Dreams is a collaborative documentary project that reimagines a Swiss myth about a wish-granting ship as a framework for intertwining stories of migration with the history of a self-organised school in Zurich. Combining drawings, archival images, participatory portraits, storytelling, and motion, the project recounts the myth’s timeless promise of hope and unfolds a counter-narrative to dominant migration discourses. It invites viewers to engage with the complex realities of migration, community-building, solidarity, and how these intersect with the universal quest for home.

Weaving together myth and collective memory, the project traces and explores the history of the Autonomous School Zurich (ASZ) through research, photography, and archival interventions, while listening to the story the school tells about itself. Its history began in 2008 through an alliance between migrants and activists responding to increasingly restrictive European asylum laws. Shaped by the search for a space to root itself—with squatting, relocations, and solidarity at its core—the ASZ has since become a grassroots political project against racism and social injustice. Defending the right to mobility, education, and belonging for all, the school offers free language lessons and creates a space where voiceless people can participate and be heard.

Together with activists and participants from the school, we drew inspiration from the legend to create collaborative portraits using paper hats shaped like boats, photographed in locations tied to the school’s history. This process began when I joined the school in 2019 as both a learner and collaborator. The symbolic refuge of the paper hat—where faces remain safely covered—became a space for participants to enrich their own narratives, freely sharing their dreams, wishes, and fears. Through this act, each person could reflect, in their own terms, on what it means to belong or to call a place home.

Across this reflective journey, Shipwreck of Dreams navigates the uncertain realities of migration today. Through its diverse imagery, it brings past, present, and imagined futures into conversation, helping raise visibility and support the school’s continuing mission.

*This project is part of the ongoing collection of works entitled 'La memoria es un pantano' (EN: Memory is a swamp). These documentary projects are based on research and the revisiting of myths, local stories, and oral traditions, aiming to embrace, retell and reimagine these narratives in a changing contemporary world. The various projects seek to open up spaces for collaborative and cross-media approaches, rethinking perspectives and experimenting with speculative counter narratives. Other projects in this collection include: La Cornuda de Tlacotalpan (2016) and Buscando al Perro Familiar (2018-ongoing).