Nadine Valcin

Our Home and Haunted Land

Our Home and Haunted Land is a linear virtual reality experience that examines the colonial histories embedded in the toponymy of a number of Toronto spaces. It incorporates research-creation and decolonial methodologies to expose the violent legacy of the land with live on. Using 3D photogrammetry scans of spaces rendered as point clouds as a starting point for the creation of virtual 3D environments, the project embraces the aesthetic of the glitch. The places that emerge from the process are between the real and the imagined. They are witness to what is lost in digital translation, the impossibility of fully capturing the real, as we build worlds in a medium we chose to call “virtual reality.” To the beauty and poetic nature of the point clouds and their liminal state between solid and void is juxtaposed a history of violence and dispossession that is carried by a narration.