This is what I wrote at the time to share my experience with others.
My visit at Fondazione Prada
After being premiered at the 70° Cannes Film Festival, the Virtual Reality installation “Carne y Arena” by Alejandro G. Inarritu is now open to the public at Fondazione Prada in Milan until 15th January 2018.
“Carne y Arena” (“Flesh and Sand”) drags people in an extreme but real circumstance, the experience teleports them inside a situation that, even if that involves the lives of millions of people, most of us, are used to watch with coolness and indifference on television: the crossing of the border between Mexico and United States. Alejandro G. Inarritu is a film director who already has proved to have an excellent ability in telling stories with the cinematic medium, but this time he needed something else, a new tool, a new technology in order to move people’s souls in a deeper way for what concern an urgent topic as the one of migrants’ crisis. Therefore, the director has decided to experiment with a new medium as VR and create an experience unprecedented. Collaborating with the well known director of photography Emanuel Lubezki, with whom already completed two feature films (“Birdman” and “The Revenant”) and also with a team of VR experts, Inarritu, with “Carne y Arena”, pushes the boundaries of Virtual Reality, both from a technological and expressive standpoint.
Because I admire Inarritu’s features films and I work in the VR industry, I coulnd’t not miss this opportunity to see a film director experimenting with the VR medium. That’s why I booked my session immediatly after Fondazione Prada made tickets available. It goes without saying that all the slot available flown off the shelves.
Once I arrived at Fondazione Prada, people at the reception asked me to leave all my stuff in their cloakroom, wallet and phone included, in order to avoid distractions and let me live the experience to the fullest. I am now in front of a building named “Deposito” (warehouse), a big building that let you imagine how much space there might be in there. Only after the experience I’ll understand why they decided to set the installation here. At the entrance, a girl of the staff warns me that they got few minutes of delays because the technology adopted to run the experience is very high-end and is easy to have some little technical problems. This news doesn’t sound bad at all to my ears, but rather enhances my excitement and expectations about it. The girl is in contact with the technical team inside and as soon as she receives the greenlight, I step through the door.
The entrance of the installation is wrapped by darkness, on a wall there is a caption (backlighted) which explains briefly the thinking behind “Carne y Arena”. Once I’ve finished to read the caption, I proceed my way through the next room. I’m in front of a cold metal door. I open it and enter in an aseptic room. The faint cold light make the room slightly visible, the ceiling is low, no windows and there are used and worn shoes all around the place. A new caption on the wall says that these shoes have been found in the desert where thousands of people decided to cross the border between Mexico and United States, defying the law and the nature. On the wall there are also some instructions. They say to take my shoes off, put them inside a locker, have a seat on a metallic bench and wait for the sound of a red siren. Only then I could open the next door. While I was waiting, I’ve forgotten of the world out there, of my appointments and things to do that day. I was ready to live the experience in the most intense way. I also started to observe more intensely the shoes around me and I asked myself: “Who they belonged to? What terrains they have been through? How long did they walk? And, moreover, what happened to these people?” My thinking is rudely interrupted by the siren: an incessant and sever sound, loud, definitely loud. I open the door and this time the room is very wide, also the ceiling is very high and reminds me a warehouse.
Immediately after my first step in this new room, I feel under my feet the terrain made of sand. Like the previous one, also this room is weakly illuminated but I can recognize two human profiles in the center of the room waiting for me. Without saying me much words they help me to wear the headset, headphones and a backpack. Few seconds and I’m in the middle of the desert, immense, boundless. On my skin I feel a breeze. In the distance I see a group of people coming towards me. The experience has begun.
Because I don’t want to spoiler the VR experience to the reader I’m not going to describe it but I can tell you this: for the whole duration of the experience I had goose bumps. My engagement was full, visceral, so much so that I’ve reacted very instinctively to the events of the story.
Once the VR experience was over and I took off all the devices, I proceeded through the next room. This new room was similar to the first one, smaller but without the shoes all over the place. There is a locker where I find my shoes. Even in this room I have to wait for the sound of the siren and while I was waiting I had time to think about the experience I’ve just lived. After a few minutes the siren activates and I enter in the last room where I see on the wall the faces of those people I’ve met in VR. Faces of real people, with some lines on their backstory, from where they come, why they left their hometown and what they went through when crossing the border.
In conclusions, “Carne y Arena” is an experiential journey and for this reason is difficult to explain with words the emotions I felt in that moment. I decided to do not spoiler the VR experience hoping the reader will be interested in experiencing it personally. The choice of creating an entire multi-sensory installation proved to be successful. Dividing the installation in different rooms, which I’d call “acclimatisation room”, “experience room” and “reflection room”, contributes to give more strength to the VR experience, empowering the impact and generating more intense emotions on the visitor.
We must acknowledge Innarritu for being wise and gentle while recreating a story of this kind without taking a position on a sensitive and difficult topic like this. He decided to let “common” people experience an event (happening right now, even when the reader is reading this) that is “common” among millions of people.
“Carne y Arena” is the result of many years of research did by the director, who wanted to be as true as possible to reality. Is not a case that also the technologies adopted are those that are capable of delivering a staggering sense of realism like the one of “motion-capture” which captures faithfully actors’ movements, or the one of “photogrammetry” that allows to re-create very credible environments.
Without any doubts, “Carne y Arena” pushes the bounderies of VR forward both as technology and medium. The hope is, also and especially, that this “push”, offered by an immersive medium as VR, is going to move people’s hearts, to make them more informed and aware on this topic. Without a widely held perception we cannot hope that a similar situation can take a turn for the better.
