A few days after our return from Copenhagen, where we joined the CPH:DOX Inter:Active festival, we present the second part of the article dedicated to the 9 projects that were developed during the CPH:LAB 2022-2023.
One of the things we love most at XRMust is to discover works that are not yet in circulation but will soon enter festival and distribution circuits, and to understand where they come from and how they are developed before reaching the final audience.
We recently had the opportunity to travel to Copenhagen to visit the Inter:Active section of the CPH:DOX festival. Curated by Mark Atkin, the section was full of creativity and innovation, which is also due to the fact that, since 2009, CPH:DOX has been hosting CPH:LAB, a “talent development programme that encourages creative risk taking, celebrates raw talent, facilitates collaboration across borders and business sectors and supports visionaries to push the existing boundaries of documentary filmmaking”.
This year, nine projects were part of the CPH:LAB, three of which we presented in the first part of this article, which you can find at this link.
Today we share with you what we found out about three of the other projects by talking to their creators.
CPH:LAB projects in alphabetical order:
- BABEL by Fanny Fortage, Harry Clunet-Farlow, Sara Didierjean (France, 2023)
- COLLATERAL ECHOES VR by Baff Akoto, Lidz-Ama Appiah, Luke W Moody (United Kingdom, Ireland, 2023)
- DIPLOMATIC REBEL by Lea Glob, Karen Waltorp, Nilab Totakhil, Mursal Khosrawi, Asma Safi, Sama Sadat Ben Haddou, Andreas Dalsgaard (Denmark, Afghanistan, 2023)
- GHOST GENES by Sister Sylvester (Ireland, 2023)
- NËPP NËPPËL by Elijah Ndoumbe, Laetitia Walendom (France, Chad, 2023)
- SLIPSTREAMING by Barbara Matijevic, Giuseppe Chico (Croatia, Italy, 2023)
- THE FOREST THAT BREATHES US by Jennifer Abbott, Suzanne Simard, Jai Djwa (Canada, 2023)
- UNSTABLE EVIDENCE by Francesca Panetta, Halsey Burgund, Magnus Bjerg, Shehani Fernando (United Kingdom, Denmark, United States, 2023)
- ZEDNA by Mikisoq Hove Lynge, Wiebe van der Vliet, David Adler (Greenland, Denmark, Netherlands, 2023)
COLLATERAL ECHOES VR by Baff Akoto, Lidz-Ama Appiah, Luke W Moody (United Kingdom, Ireland, 2023)
Collateral Echoes is a new VR artwork concerned with the disproportionate instances of Black and Immigrant Britons who have died at the hands of the police since records began in 1969. Through sensorial renderings of archival images, artefacts and oral testimonies from those bereaved, this work questions how personal memories might be experienced as collective commemoration.
A. – What is Collateral Echoes VR about?
LIDZ-AMA APPIAH – Essentially, we are creating a virtual memorial for the families.
The work is an open invitation to join them, to feel welcomed. Here you will feel the love, and the recognised horror of tragedy. The user should leave the experience feeling uplifted by the contributor’s resilience and also outrage at the injustice. To date, legacy media, and soundbite culture hasn’t allowed for the story of the victim/s to be told.
A. – Why did you choose to tell the story using VR?
L. A. A. – For this particular subject matter, VR as a medium offers another level of intimacy. Right now, for Baff Akoto exploring the artistic potential of VR/AR is a continuation of his practice.
He has become increasingly concerned with how the digital revolution might avoid some of the prejudices, exclusions and inequalities in the visual arts which arose during the industrial and colonial eras. Although the story is set in the UK, the themes of commemoration, injustice, family and memory will resonate with audiences beyond borders.
A. – How has the Lab influenced your work? And what are you looking for now?
L. A. A. – Being in a network of other VR filmmakers willing to share ideas, challenges and support was invaluable. It has opened up a world of storytelling that has been inspiring.
Collateral Echoes is in late development. We are seeking finance and production partners to move into production by summer 2023. We are also very keen to meet new media exhibition spaces, and art galleries who can platform and support a full-scale installation of the work or tour a more standalone headset experience.
THE FOREST THAT BREATHES US by Jennifer Abbott, Suzanne Simard, Jai Djwa (Canada, 2023)
A virtual reality experience from filmmaker Jennifer Abbott with ground-breaking forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, The Forest That Breathes Us transports participants into a perspective of unfathomable interconnection by taking them inside the complex communication networks, familial relationships, memories and agency of a forest.
A. – What is the focus of The Forest that Breathes Us?
JENNIFER ABBOTT – Our project hopes to contribute to a cultural reimagining of what it means to be human and our place on our planet, inspiring radical acts of transformation and solidarity with the more than human world. For at its most broad, The Forest That Breathes Us is a critique of dominant Western cultural conceptions of human beings as the apex of evolution, as exceptional and superior and as separate, atomized individuals living outside of nature. Participants who enter our speculatively imaginative world become privy to life entangled with other life; a worldview more in line with many Indigenous cosmologies, by other wisdom traditions and, of course, by the groundbreaking findings of our scientific collaborator Dr. Suzanne Simard.
A. – Why do you think VR was the best way to approach this specific topic?
J. A. – Virtual reality’s unique ability to create intense feelings of presence within worlds of altered perspectives deems it our ideal medium. VR affords us the ability to create for participants the feeling of leaving their human embodiment to flow within the profound networks of our forest, communicate in ways they didn’t know possible and create kinship with the world around them. VR affords us the ability to create the kind of intensity and feeling of complete immersion and emotional engagement within this worldview in a way that other mediums do not.
A. – On which elements of your project and its development did your mentor at CPH:Lab and the other teams have the greatest impact?
J. A. – It was a great privilege to learn from artists and media makers who have been at the forefront of using VR for storytelling, creative and activist ends. Being a documentary filmmaker, at times it was hard to learn of the technical limitations of 360-degree filming but at the same time, ideas for our project were definitely expanded. Generally, we also appreciated riffing off the creative energy of such an amazing team of mentors and fellow creators, especially after the last few years of isolation during COVID.
DIPLOMATIC REBEL by Lea Glob, Karen Waltorp, Nilab Totakhil, Mursal Khosrawi, Asma Safi, Sama Sadat Ben Haddou, Andreas Dalsgaard (Denmark, Afghanistan, 2023)
Diplomatic Rebel is an RPG for Smartphone and Tablet. You play the 16-year-old ’Ariana’ navigating the Afghan and Danish cultures, earning both Rebel points and Diplomatic points along the way as you create a space for YOU without burning bridges.
A. – What is, for you, the deep core of this project?
KAREN WALTORP – A wish to show both very real daily dilemmas and the beauty of living across cultures for a young minority woman; to stay true to the sets of expectations, norms, values and traditions she must navigate and bust (medias) stereotypes of minoritized young women, Muslim women and, in this case, with an Afghan background.
This has been the wish and motivation of Asma M. Safi, Nilab Totakhil, and Mursal Khosrawi since the beginning of our collaboration, and we have been a Film Collective since 2017/2018. We work with a radical collaborative approach. We are also co-authors of scientific articles, as I’m an associate professor at University of Copenhagen and have expertise in diaspora, migration, gender etc, and al thel women in the collective have an MA and we have been doing joint research since 2017. I call it ‘research-though-collaborative-filmmaking’
Also there is something existential about coming-of-age and striving to find the balance between making room for yourself and making room for others. This is reflected in the REBEL points and DIPLOMATIC points you have to earn in the game. The 2 worlds – the physical and the metaphysical – interplay: 16-year old Ariana (you as the player of the game), who arrived in Denmark as a refugee from Afghanistan and now has to navigate life as a Danish high school student is transported to the metaphysical realm, when she struggles to find that balance and connect with her Danish friends or her Afghan family and friends.
The Afghan carpet as a portal transports her into the metaphysical realm, where she can catch globes of wisdom, inspired by Jungian ideas of a collective unconscious, and possibly by Alam Al-Mithal (a realm of images) in Dufi mysticism of the Golden Age. This metaphysical world allows her to glimpse personal and collective memories (in the form of 2D videos) that help her forward.
NILAB TOTAKHI – Besides all the great points above, one of the main reasons why this project is relevant is representation. Not only for us, but for all ethnic minority Danes. The game in this case is based on our Afghan culture and traditions, but the aim is to have a universal take on it, so that it is transformable for all ethnic minority groups. The game mechanics have been developed in such a way that the dilemmas and choices offered by the game are adaptable to all groups.
We aim for each player, whether of majority or minority Danish ethnicity, to have a developmental curve in both skills (negotiating at home and outside in Danish society), and in understanding Danish and Afghan culture and the social structures that lay the foundations for these two worlds. Or perhaps to gain insight into the human and biological motivation that can lay the ground for all parent’s choices regarding their kids. Alam Al-Mithal has been briefly put at play but not decided upon: the metaphysical world is still under development.
A. – Why did you choose to approach this work using a game engine and the smartphone medium?
K. W. – Accessibility/reach of the story is important to all the women in the collective, but a curated experience with XR elements could also have been the format. There is something to the fact that your choices matter that we are interested in, though.
Asma, Nilab and Mursal would like for young minoritized women to see/experience these representations, in which they might mirror themselves. They lacked it growing up – in film, TV, games, across the media landscape. Lea and I wish to add our expertise in research and storytelling across platforms. With the game engine – we are all learning as we go, though!
In addition, the audience is imagined to be ethnic majority people, who will get a chance to ‘walk a mile’ in the shoes of Ariana.Through her dilemmas and the information contained in the ‘globes of wisdom’, the game provides deep cultural context and understanding. From both Afghan and Danish cultures, past-present.
N. T. – Since our main target group are young people aged between 13 and 20, it is only natural to try to catch them where they spend most of their time: smartphones and tablets. Also, the fact that you can access the game at any time, as long as you have your phone handy, is a big thrill. Furthermore, one of the aims of the game is to be used for educational purposes at schools. This part is based on my background as a school teacher, with a Master’s degree in International Development and Global Studies and a Bachelor’s degree in Education. My experience shows that apps on phones and tablets are the easiest medium to use for educational purposes.
A. – How was the LAB experience useful to you?
K. W. – We applied to the CPH:Dox Lab with the idea of a crowdsourced archive as part of our film (in development with Elk Film). But the amazingly inspiring mentors developed our ideas towards the game format, really putting the audience/player in the shoes of the playable character. We felt this was a very strong concept, and were mentored by our idol Kat Cizek from the MIT Co-Creation Studio. The ideas took shape thanks to her input as well as the input of Vassiliki Khonsari, Mark Atkin and all the mentors and fellow Lab participants. It was an incredible creative group to be part of – stepping into new territory for us.
Asma films, I have already made an ethnographic documentary in CPH:Dox (Manenberg) and Lea Glob is a multi-award winning filmmaker, who just won the main prize at IDFA (Apolonia Apolonia)– so within the documentary format we have between us a collective experience… However, working with games has been mind-blowing and a steep learning curve. In my practice I work with multimodal approaches (film, digital, sketching, etc), and I think we work with both film and game as formats/mediums because they allow us to reach other audiences and provide different experiences and insights. We hope that it will be a ‘universe’ to be experienced, where film and game are in synergy, through a series of elements that exist across the two formats. For example, the small videos you unlock in the game are videos taken from our film material. And animation may play a role too..
N. T. – CPH:DOX gave us a platform and the necessary support to develop our project in new directions. It was there that the idea of a game was developed, since we came to the Lab with a documentary and crowdsourced archive, as Karen said. Hence the idea for Diplomatic Rebel came about quite randomly on one of the very first days of the LAB, when during a discussion about negotiations techniques at home we came to the conclusion that this could be transposed into a game. Since we had already been discussing the use of the documentary and the crowdsourced archive as an educational tool in schools as well, the game just made sense on so many levels. And as Karen says, our mentors at the LAB were very good at grasping the idea with us and helping us to develop and grow the project into what it has become today.
A. – What are you looking for now, in terms of development?
K. W. – We have limited experience. Right now we are looking for an animator, a programmer and a game production company. We have a promising dialogue with a production company that we hope will materialize in the near future. We have amazing mentors and consultants (Kat Cizek, Vassiliki Khonsari, David Adler) and we are very excited about our next steps thanks to all the feedback and new contacts we have met through Cph:Dox Lab.
Stay tuned for part three and to discover the other three projects presented in this edition of CPH:Lab!
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