Montreal made, multi-user interactive VR experience TRACES : THE GRIEF PROCESSOR, directed by Vali Fugulin, invites you to explore your own grief with others. It was recently selected at SXSW and nominated for Best in XR at Games for Change 2025 Festival.
Are you rushing around with a full inbox and an even fuller head? A brain bogged down by lists and calls and questions and physical needs of your body, of family.. A life that has endless obligations and unknowns? It’s an immense privilege to have some sort of stability and security, when just around the corner there are others with barely enough food or water to survive the day. It’s incomparable somehow, but yet, the human condition isn’t so that when having physical needs met, all the rest falls into place. Whether we discuss it or not, many if not all carry some sort of ambiguous grief. Grief is different from surviving genocide, wars, man made famines, ecological disaster, family violence.. Grief is after the violence, after the loss, the long and slow aching reality that haunts and stays in our bodies to the point of affecting our immune systems. It’s something that can manifest itself in surprising ways, and something that artist and inquisitive soul Vali Fugulin sought to explore in an immersive, interactive, wearable VR format.
Produced by Ziad Touma from Montreal-based Couzin Films (THE PASSENGERS, 2022) and funded by Sodec and its Atelier Grand Nord XR, TRACES : THE GRIEF PROCESSOR premiered in Competition at SXSW this spring, was just nominated for the Games for Change Best in XR Award and is currently featured at BIFAN’s Beyond Reality XR selection in South Korea. This is an experience that leads us through a voyage shaped by Vali’s own personal journey, guided by her co-narrator Stéphane Crête, a grief specialist and “guardian of the symbolic world” as she describes:
Stephane always says that in a ritual : ‘what happens on the outside also happens on the inside (of an individual)’. That sentence has guided me throughout the creation of TRACES. Even though I don’t call the piece itself a ritual, I have been inspired by his vision of universal grief rituals upon creating it.
In TRACES, grief is not just something to overcome but rather something to be acknowledged and expressed. There’s a real desire to be in dialogue and community with the universal complexities of loss. And in doing so, this work asks how this process can be more gently integrated into the fabric of life.
Months before SXSW I had the opportunity to experience an Ambiguous Grief Workshop at a community arts festival in Cambridge. Totally outside of XR, a duo trained as death doulas combined their knowledge and skills to test out an early draft of a project. I was one of seven that signed up. I learned grief isn’t just the simple definition I had been exposed to before, that there are many forms and that there are ways to hold space and walk through it.
And then, months later, I encountered Vali Fuglin’s project TRACES : THE GRIEF PROCESSOR, a grief processing immersive journey that really touched me. Truly, this one sticks with me and is part of what gave me the feeling again that there is active hope-work that can be developed through this tech. As with everything VR, finding the right words to explain what happened and what it felt like is challenging. It’s an exercise in itself! But it’s worth the pause and reflection, because each time I step away from it, the idea of this article pops back in my head. Maybe because I’m still processing the process!
This is a four person experience, where in the virtual world you can see the twinkling silhouette of those who join you. We started outside of the headset, with a web app asking us a question about our own grief. We were encouraged to share a photo that represented that loss. The onboarding wasn’t a rushed experience, but it’s SXSW, so you know you don’t have much time. But thanks to this, there is an impetus to choose instinctively. I chose a photo of a ring that was my grandmother’s. I chose to do the experience in French. The words felt to me like Vali was with us, like there was a proximity with her that was embedded in the work. The landscapes were gorgeous, the transitions from virtual scene to scene were soft and thoughtful. I loved the treatment of light and shapes, the way we are all in space and carefully choreographed to wander without hitting each other through teleportation and a clever UX design made of encouraging portals of light. I loved it, I felt moved. At one point we manifested our grief in the form of a glowing shimmering pixel ball of swirling polygons. The invisible pain that we carry in a society that doesn’t always have the ritual or ceremony to give space for this in the ways that make sense, was suddenly here, beautiful, moldable, and most importantly – visible.
Grief is slightly different for everyone. It can come from the life you wished you could have lived but never had the chance, from a friend that disappeared from your life because paths were too far apart, and of course, from losing someone or ones close. It is inescapable and complicated as heck. And working in an emerging medium without scripts (not literally), it can feel like the world is spinning too fast to take time for processing. And here, with this fast-paced tech, we could slow down. And let me tell you, for me, my headset fogged up, my heart filled up, and my respect for Vali and her work ballooned.
This is also the case because I kept seeking her out throughout the festival to ask questions and frantically document her words. My main question at SXSW was WHY VR? Asking this to Vali at the beginning of the fest before the grand public really was on site, Vali shared:
VR is for exploring experiences you can’t have in real life — things you’d never get to see or express otherwise. Grappling with my own grief, I wondered: can this medium be used to help us visualize what’s inside us, what words can’t capture: actions, emotions, embodiment ? In VR, could you share profound feelings, even cry inside your headset? — would that be okay ? I wanted to explore the way in which It could let you see the invisible, make the intangible playful. I wanted to create a space where people could connect in this way — quietly, deeply, together.”
In making this work, and pursuing the vast challenges of doing so, Vali “wanted to dig in, see if [they] could do something emotional,” but also playful, not grief that pulls you down into a spirally muck of heaviness, but something else.
At one point in the experience we are able to reconnect with our photo that we shared in the beginning, the one we chose before plunging into the tech, putting on the VR headsets and entering the virtual landscapes where story and UX design unfold and allow us to encounter and engage with our grief from a different perspective. In a small hut or cocoon-like cave, the photo is there, the size of a large painting on a wall. We are asked to share a few words of what this represents, while the headset captures our responses. Seeing my photo of my grandmother’s ring in this way was really moving. There are some that said to me after that this was a lot for them, but I found it helped me connect deeper to that object, to my grandmother, and to what losing her meant. Later in the experience when we are back together we will find ourselves around a large tree. The trunk is populated with dozens of images from ourselves and others who have agreed to archive their stories in this virtual space. Approach an image, lift your hand and the black and white photograph will return to color and you can hear the voice of whoever shared their grief. We were able to wander and engage with others’ loss. The message? You are not alone. And for Vali, archiving participants’ responses is precious. While SXSW was the first showcase and there might be fears about data and exposure, there is a real intention of care around what is shared and what it means. “VR can be so clinical— the gear, buttons, wires..” and so this level of vulnerability expressed through such a device is something I find profound – It’s techno-optimism and compassion at its best.
Later in the week I circled back with Vali and asked her how things were going. She shared that it was very emotional for her to show TRACES : THE GRIEF PROCESSOR and for people exiting the experience. She had no expectations for how the reactions would be, and even doubts. What if people don’t react? But coming out, people shared how they are moved, and for those that know VR, it felt like they were seeing how the technology can be used in an intimate way.
Then I asked her about her own grief. Touching my arm she shared the following:
Grief is better lived when shared, not carried alone. By sharing this experience with others, I feel like I’m part of a community of people that are also going through different kinds of grief. The growing tree, the expanding collection of testimonies… to be in the virtual universe together creates a level of intimacy I never could have hoped for. It gets us to know others more deeply, and they’ve come to know me as well. We share something quiet, profound, and real — and in this space, it has room to grow.
I am most proud of the fact that we were able to technically develop, working with Neek Studio, a way for us to have users add, bring their own memories, their own content : photos, words, voice. When people see their own content in the VR world, it’s very powerful for them. It was my dream to craft a VR experience that unfolds and personalizes itself in near real time—shaped by each person’s presence and memories as they move through it.
Vali’s work is not just VR, she is a storyteller in all formats, and all her work is documentary based. For her, “documentary is about interacting with other humans, listening, having empathy, trying to convey their story in the most respectful way.” And with TRACES? Vali says,
I’m trying to transpose this in VR. How could we self-document, but also feel empathy, care for one another? Technology [like this] was perhaps not made for storytellers or artists, but we can reclaim it.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.