RAPTURE

↳ Alisa Berger

FR 2024, 00:19:22

RAPTURE I – VISIT
18’
Video projection

RAPTURE II – PORTAL
19’
VR experience

RAPTURE revolves around Ukrainian Vogue dancer Marko and his confrontation with his abandoned apartment in the Donbas region, where the war has been ongoing for over ten years. Marko cannot return to Ukraine or Donbas (now Russia) due to the continuing war, sparked by Russia’s aggressive full-scale invasion. To inherit his apartment, Marko would need to enter Russia, where he would immediately be conscripted and forced to fight against his own country, Ukraine.

In RAPTURE I – VISIT, Marko engages in an on-screen VR experiment – he visits his abandoned and inaccessible apartment, which has been recreated using a 3D photogrammetry scan based on original photographs taken by a photographer inside the occupied region. This first tale of RAPTURE offers a digital reconquest of the occupied space, as Marko visits it through VR for the first time since 2018.

In this piece, RAPTURE is a peculiar concept, revolving around the transformation of one’s mind, transporting it to another place, escaping reality or horrors. In a way, displacement for victims of war is a form of rapture, a forced removal from one’s home and identity. Revisiting this space digitally, trying to heal or reclaim it through the virtual, twists this concept. It blurs the line between recovery and loss, offering a possible return through technology, but does it ultimately deepen the confrontation with what is lost?

The second part of the diptych is the VR piece RAPTURE II – PORTAL, in which the viewer becomes a participant in the experiment, with Marko acting as the guide. It’s almost as if the roles of viewer and subject are switched. The VR film fuses the idea of a physically lost home with the body of a dancer as an eternal, infinite home. Structured as a hypnosis session, the viewer is guided through the 3D replication of Marko’s apartment, created through photographs from the occupied area and merged with 3D scans of destroyed Ukrainian cities and landscapes from other, unoccupied parts of Ukraine. Vogue dance elements juxtapose the strength of the human body in dance with its vulnerability in the face of war technology.