GAWI, meaning “Mother Earth”, is a VR dream experience co-created with the Rarámuri, an indigenous community in Northern Mexico. You will join them on an intimate journey in which you follow their collective dream.
You enter this VR dream with Isabel, a Rarámuri woman, as she seeks guidance from her ancestors and nature by lying down in the calming shade of the pines to dream. As a spirited guest, you fly through voluminous canyons, cloudy blue skies, and vast forests. The experiences follows a dreamlike narrative that unfolds to the rhythm of an ancient Rarámuri poem celebrating indigenous ecological wisdom to heal the Earth and oneself.
The production of GAWI is an experiment in co-creation practices and researches the ethics of representation and storytelling in immersive media. In-depth interview with director Myriam Hernandez.
Myriam: I am a Mexican VR enthusiast bringing more than 10 years of experience working with indigenous communities in my country. My current work focuses on the use of VR for advancing social and economic equity through immersive storytelling and designing interventions using XR technology to drive behavioral change.
I gravitated to VR almost by accident. As a fundraiser for a local organization in southern Mexico, I became involved in the production of a 360 film narrating a day in the life of an indigenous Tsotsil girl who the organization was supporting on her educational journey.
This experience with immersive storytelling for creating empathy and raising awareness showed me the potential of VR technology to bridge very distant realities. This first encounter also sparked a lot of self-inquiry about the power dynamics between storytellers, story-bearers and end users. I reflected on how the creative process could be an emancipatory practice based on self-representation, agency, care, and a decolonizing approach. The relationship fabric I generated with Loxa – the protagonist of this 360 film- and her family was undoubtedly the fuel that sent me on this journey of ethical VR filmmaking (Making of Loxa).
How can VR/360 film be a medium for social advocacy and policy change?
Myriam: Any communication medium is a tool for social advocacy and policy change. These are the channels in which ideas disseminate and ultimately ignite social mobilization for progressive change, or against it. The unique opportunity VR brings is the possibility of embodiment and full immersion into experiences of oppression, wisdom, spirituality and hope. Although I am an optimist of how XR can contribute to social change, I recognise that this medium still has a long way to go to become a space where activists, marginalized identities and communities from the Global South feel welcomed, safe, and represented.
Myriam: In my experience, the VR community felt almost impossible to access, as the content and distribution VR platforms are niched in technology and knowledge elite institutions based in a handful of wealthy countries. This, however, motivated me to look for producers, artists, and voices who are diversifying and decolonizing this sphere so that their stories and lived experiences are not captured in the virtual world and reproduced endlessly for the benefit and sensibilization of the relative few who have VR headsets. Instead of objects of the stories, I started looking for projects that aim to challenge the medium, shape it, and even make it a space of their own. It is in this intersection of ethics, social justice and immersive storytelling where I find a positive answer on how VR can be a tool for social and policy change, and that was the goal behind producing GAWI.
How did you begin the process of producing GAWI? How did you find funding?
Myriam: GAWI is a VR film co-created with the Rarámuri culture, from Northern Mexico. The Rarámuri indigenous communities have been guarding their environment and culture for millennia. They build their reality and wisdom by connecting with their dreams. At a time of climate crisis, the Rarámuri invite us to join them through a dream-like VR experience. In this oneiric film, you enter an intimate journey that unfolds at the pace of an ancestral poem about how to become a real Rarámuri and heal the planet (GAWI) and yourself.
Beyond being a VR project placing indigenous ecological wisdom at the center of the climate emergency conversation, GAWI is also a research-action project powered by the Atlantic Fellowship for Social and Economic Equity, based in the London School of Economics, and the Atlantic Institute, based in Oxford, UK. I had to get my work endorsed by two prestigious institutions to have the opportunity to produce a VR film in which the creative process is more important than the outcome. These partnerships reflect how Global North-based institutions are starting to engage with power-shifting dynamics. GAWI is, therefore, a reference of trust-based funding, which I struggle to find as neither a professional filmmaker or VR expert.
As part of my Atlantic Fellowship on Social and Economic Equity (AFSEE), I wanted to experiment and document how (VR) filmmaking can be an emancipatory practice for communities. My idea was to promote a democratic and decolonizing alternative to produce and engage with immersive storytelling. Since this field of action is still very new for me, I felt free to learn from others, fail, and adapt. Even if we didn’t end up making an actual VR experience, I would document the process to share our experience with other campaigners, grassroot collectives, and VR storytellers. You can watch the co-creation process in this short documentary.
The ethical principles and social equity inquiry were my main inputs for GAWI, the rest of this VR experience has been dreamed, consulted and co-created collectively. As part of the pre-production process, I waited for the story and the community to come to me through an open call for collaborations for indigenous communities in Mexico. When I saw the application from Lorenzo and Isabel, leaders of Experiencias Rarámuri, a local tourism initiative promoting the biocultural preservation of the Barrancas del Cobre in Chihuahua, I got a gut feeling that they were the teachers I was hoping to find to guide me through this journey.
Myriam: When the team and I introduced our intentions with this project, Lorenzo and Isabel calmly replied, “We will dream about it, and we will let you know.” I saw another exciting opportunity to plug in VR as a reality-creator technology and how it could match with creating virtual worlds stemming from indigenous dreaming traditions, poetry and aesthetics.
Why did you choose a co-creative approach? What is the relationship between storytelling and representation?
If you want to make movies about us – don’t send in your cameras. Hire us! We can tell our own stories.
Arthur Pratt
Myriam: This quote from Arthur Pratt, Ugandan founder of WeOwnTV Freetown Media Center, summarizes it all. Stories shape our understanding of the world around us, and if the stories are created and mediated by those “having the skills and credentials,” we are taking the space from voices living on the fringes of today’s society. It’s a good first step to adopt participatory approaches, but I still think this is not enough. We need bolder and more radical power shifts to challenge how the creative and the development sectors work. This includes funding criteria, skills-transfer opportunities, coherent copyright schemes, circular accountability, multilingualism, and many other aspects.
My goal from my AFSEE fellowship year was to identify and interview immersive storytellers engaged with this co-creative, participatory approach. From the exploration of others’ practices and lessons learned, I developed an “ethical checklist for immersive storytelling” (read checklist). This is a practice-oriented tool to produce VR for social impact. This checklist is not an exhaustive list of do’s and don’ts. It is rather a roadmap guide to design and execute more equal, decolonizing, and ethical storytelling in any format. Ultimately, the stories we experience through VR and AR can elevate new narratives, solutions, and invitations for change. In GAWI’s case, embracing a horizontal structure from the beginning, led us to discover a powerful and wise narrative on the role indigenous people have in guarding and keeping the Earth alive and thriving.
The Experiencias Rarámuri group was ready to take on a project like this. Their community organizing follows a decentralized and participatory logic, so our invitation for co-creation made sense to them. They embraced the production team and the VR technology as allies supporting the messages they have been upholding for decades regarding land dispossession, economic inclusion, and respect for their land. VR was just a new channel to get their resistance recognized and supported. This was one of my main motives––that the VR film served their struggle, not the other way around as it commonly happens in film productions.
I acknowledge the great work other storytellers are doing in the XR scene. I celebrate how our projects aim to achieve the same goal. I think the main contribution GAWI offers to this collective effort is that it is intended to be a platform for an emerging community of practice for ethical immersive storytelling. To this date, it has been very rewarding to see how both the checklist and the advocacy efforts underpinning this project have allowed the Raramuri people to have a seat on the table in XR spaces, climate action forums, and prestigious cultural events.
What are the next steps for GAWI?
The XR Lab was incredibly supportive of building a dream physical exhibition for GAWI. The installation included an onboarding with photos of the landscape in Northern Mexico and an audio recording that set the tone for a meditative experience to connect with GAWI (Mother Earth) and with the Rarámuri culture.
Before entering the VR experience the audience received a postcard with a traditional Rarámuri poem which is the voiceover in the 360 film. After experiencing GAWI in headset, which itself is structured as a dream experience, the guests were invited to add their own dream for healing the planet to a collective dream journal that travels with the GAWI exhibition.
The feedback we had was very positive. Alice Wroe, the director of this space mentioned:
It was an honor to screen GAWI at the Atlantic Fellows XR Lab in Oxford. I have worked in XR for many years and have never seen a piece have such a profound effect on an audience. People were moved to tears by the stunning depiction of the Rarámuri territory and the gentle yet powerful storytelling. The world needs more VR pieces like this, that are authentically community-led and help us to understand how we can better care for each other and the world.
Alice Wroe, XR Lead, Atlantic Institute
GAWI is looking to premiere in international and regional VR festivals. In parallel, we are refining our impact strategy for the next year. We are now training the Rarámuri on the use of the VR technology so they can lead a permanent exhibition of GAWI in their territory and in any other community spaces that are relevant to them. We are also excited to continue sharing our learnings on ethical storytelling among film and XR circles and offeg workshops on indigenous ecological wisdom and the use of technology to safeguard and celebrate cultural heritage.
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