VR Immersive Experience Carne Y Arena Brings Immigration to Life

Intersectionality, accessibility, and squashing the sexist, patriarchal norms through queer…

The Stanley Marketplace in Aurora has teamed with the Denver Center for the Performing Arts (DCPA) to deliver an immersive, virtual reality experience unlike anything you have likely ever encountered. Carne y Arena is the truly groundbreaking, virtual reality project that is likely to change your life as you explore the human condition of immigrants and refugees.

There is no line between imagination and reality, as the exhibition puts you directly in the shoe-less world of a human being who is crossing the border to the United States from South America. That’s right, no shoes allowed in this single-person, interactive narrative that places you directly into the conditions of a border-town desert.

Re-enacting a scene in the desert. Credit: Legendary // Photo: Chachi Ramirez

Test to get the right amount of sand on the shoe. The migrants talk about sand being everywhere and in everything. Credit: Legendary // Photo: Chachi Ramirez

Based on true accounts of individuals who have endured a journey such as this, conceptualizer and artist Alejandro G. Iñárritu weaves together a narrative that is full of sensory activation in Carne y Arena. You physically feel the icy cold benches of the “freezer” holding cells and walk sans shoes on the rough and pebbled terrain of the sandy dunes. Experience a fragment of the harsh and brutal terrain, and you witness the fear and terror of folks who are willing to risk life and limb in order to obtain a better life for themselves and their families.

“During the making of this project, I had the privilege of meeting and interviewing many Mexican and Central American refugees,” Iñárritu says on the DCPA website. “Their life stories haunted me, so I invited some of them to collaborate with me on the project. My intention was to experiment with VR technology to explore the human condition in an attempt to break the dictatorship of the frame—within which things are just observed—and claim the space to allow the visitor to go through a direct experience walking in the immigrants’ feet, under their skin, and into their hearts.”

A user in the experience. Photo: Emmanuel Lubezki

As a scene unfolds when the VR goggles and headphones are placed on you, the experience for each individual who takes part varies from that of another. The emotional albeit necessary experience will undoubtedly deliver a sense of humanity and empathy to everyone who immerses themselves into Carne y Arena, regardless of their former stance on immigration. To witness the story, to immerse yourself in their experience, and to read story after story of those who were fortunate enough to survive the trek, every, single person will undoubtedly be deeply impacted, and even changed.

Never before has such a creative risk been taken, and with the exhaustive divisiveness that plagues the United States in each and every affair, it may just take something as brave as Carne y Arena to soften the hearts and open the ears of us all.