Summary:

Over a year in the making, a team of international BIPOC artists collaborated to claim some space in the metaverse with a new kind of gallery of art and storytelling. The exhibition centers women and non-binary voices and identities, in an expansive, cosmic exploration of cultural, personal, and mythic experience.

Created for the Quest 2 in partnership between The Alliance for Media Arts + Culture and Versatile Media, visitors to the XR Culture Gallery will experience the first “room” of immersive artworks in a space we call Ancestral Futurism.

The Gallery features 3D works by Lola Flash, Catherine Blackburn, Karo Duro, Jessi Ujazi and Valentina Vargas. The works were curated by Afua Kafi-Akua, Chanelle Elaine, Kali Spitzer, and Jessi Ujazi, along with producer Cassidy Arkin and executive producer Wendy Levy.

Director Bio:

Sadah Espii Proctor (she/her/Espii) is a multimedia director and composer/sound artist working in live performance, installations, and immersive experiences. From a first-generation American perspective (Liberia and Guyana), her work centers around themes of memory and diaspora, social issues, and presence within physical/digital/virtual spaces. Member of ONX, Television Academy, Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts (AIVA), Alliance of Women Directors (AWD), and New York Women in Film and Television (NYWIFT).

Valentina Vargas is a Colombian storyteller who explores the complex realities of the places she inhabits through documentary filmmaking and performing arts. She envisioned the XR Culture Gallery as a way to reclaim and democratize the virtual space for Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities. “We are aware of how privileged it is to access the metaverse. So, to be able even to create something for it is the first step of rethinking and reclaiming the virtual world.”