Immersive empathy
An amazing virtual-reality exhibit takes you to Texas at dawn, Chris Knight writes.
I have walked in the sand at Cannes before, but never like this.
In a virtual-reality exhibit directed — designed? created? curated? — by Mexican director Alejandro Iñárritu, I experienced an illegal border crossing into the United States, complete with gun-toting guards, German shepherd dogs and a blast of light and downdraft from a police helicopter. I left the six-minute experience choking back tears, and literally shaking with emotion and adrenalin.
Called Carne y Arena — literally Flesh & Sand, though its English title is Virtually Present, Physically Invisible — the exhibit sits in a hangar at the tiny local airport.
A black, tinted-windowed car takes me there from the city centre. Sign this waiver, they say at check-in. Give us your bag, wallet, cellphone, keys and — I have never before relinquished this in my 10 years at the Cannes Film Festival — your press badge.
I enter an antechamber, where I remove my shoes and socks. An alarm sounds, which means it’s time to enter the main space. A huge square room, easily 20 metres on a side. Three helpers strap me into a backpack, VR goggles and earphones. A moment later, I am no longer in the south of France. I am in a scrubby Texas desert at dawn.
Migrants come struggling toward me. A woman, helping a limping child who can’t be more than seven. An old man collapses, his water bottle empty. Then the helicopter arrives. Trucks pull up. Dogs. Guards with very big guns. “Put your hands up!” I can’t help but obey. “On your knees!” I remain standing, as the others drop, those who aren’t already in the sand that I can both see and feel beneath my feet.
I’m not really here, I tell myself.
The scene dissolves. I stand before a table, on which a tiny boat, overstuffed with refugees, founders and sinks into the wood. The faceless, six-inch human figures struggle in absolute silence. I reach out to them. My hand passes through the table. I’m not there. Another dissolve. I’m back in the desert. The migrants are being separated, men from women. I hesitate, uncertain where to go, and as one of them walks THROUGH me I glimpse her beating heart. They are herded forward. And suddenly I am back in an airport hangar in France.
On the way out are photographs and stories of the real migrants who performed for the exhibit. Also a case of shoes, reminiscent of a Holocaust museum, except the footwear is modern. They were left behind by migrants crossing the border.
One pair resembles an old pair of sandals I just replaced. Another could fit my nine-yearold son. Almost in tears, I flee back into the Mediterranean sunshine that — despite the evidence of all my senses — I never really left.
The one drawback of Iñárritu’s installation — compared by more than one critic, not inaccurately, to that moment in 1896 when audiences first gasped at a moving image of a train pulling into a station — is that it cannot be easily shared.
Fewer than 1,000 people will experience Carne y Arena during its 10 days at Cannes. (In comparison, the main cinema at the festival seats 2,300.) It will then move on to museums in Milan, Los Angeles and Mexico.