The sky’s the limit: the innovative spirit of Eurimages New Lab Award-winner Duchampiana

“You need to be a little bit crazy to follow Lilian into this idea and to make it work,” says Sarah Arnaud of Tchikiboum, one of the producers on the artistic VR installation Duchampiana. The piece premiered in Venice Immersive 2024 after its presentation in IFFR Pro’s CineMart and work-in-progress platform Darkroom – where it won a Eurimages New Lab Outreach Award for innovative, non-conventional and experimental works exploring new forms of expression. 

Reversing traditional restrictions placed on the female form throughout art history and beyond, the work invites the audience to ascend an infinite staircase – a radical reimagining of one of art history’s most notorious paintings, Duchamp’s Nude Descending A Staircase No 2. 

The project’s director Lilian Hess comes from a documentary and narrative film background and experimented with the idea first in a short film form. “Later when I started working with immersive media”, she recounts “I was like, ‘oh, it needs to actually involve movement. That is what this story needs.’”

Technologically, this meant the complex challenge of asking a stair climber to communicate with a VR headset. “Probably since day one workshopping this project, we were discouraged from making a VR piece on a stair climber”, says Hess. “But I think we went into this with very open eyes”, she explains, of the process that took place over three years and two countries – co-produced by Tchikiboum (France) and mYndstorm productions (Germany). 

If ever the team was discouraged, it certainly wasn’t at IFFR, where the project was presented in CineMart Immersive in 2022 and later at the Darkroom work-in-progress platform in 2024, just six months before its Venice premiere. In 2021 it won a special mention for the 4DR Studios Award, and at Darkroom picked up a €30,000 prize as the winner of one of the inaugural Eurimages New Lab Awards.

IFFR and CPH:DOX were both selected to present the Eurimages New Lab Awards for the initial cycle, and have since awarded eight projects in total. The Innovation Award (€20,000) supports projects in development that promote experimentation, while the Outreach Award (€30,000) supports work-in-progress projects focused on audience engagement. 

“We could push the piece to be not just good but flawless.”

Duchampiana’s main innovation according to Hess can be found in “the custom motion tracking system that we implemented, which essentially uses AI to read human motion, to then send signals to the stair climber and the gaming engine to react to one’s movements.” The Eurimages New Lab Award, according to Arnaud, coming in the advanced stage that it did, meant that “we could push the piece to be not just good but flawless.”

Combining innovative technological spirit with the emotion of the subject was where the success lay, according to Arnaud, not least through the motion capture of dancer Chihiro Kawasaki ascending the staircase. “What she managed to do is to be able to convey real emotion just through the movement of climbing stairs, which is very difficult.” Hess says in a tech-heavy process, it was her guiding principle as a director simply to “bring everyone back to the emotion, the idea, the feel of the piece.”

Right from its premiere, it was obvious this wasn’t lost on the audience. “When you arrive in Venice and the first person goes on the stair climber, takes off the headset and says ‘this was beautiful’ – I could have left the island, my job was done!,” says Arnaud. 

“A parallel universe in which, as women, we are granted the space to climb, to excel, to succeed.”

“Stairs are such a metaphorically charged space”, reflects Hess. “I love that people had very different takeaways: from more literal, to spiritual and religious. People had experiences where they felt it was about colonisation, there were people who felt it was about ridding yourself of your burdens.” The most rewarding of all, according to Hess, were the feminist takeaways: “an experience of freedom from patriarchal values, a parallel universe in which, as women, we are granted the space to climb, to excel, to succeed.”

Despite deciding against a deliberate impact campaign for the project, the team were especially heartened to pick up the Impact Prize at the NewImages Festival in Paris, where the jury praised its “political stance” as “a bold experience” that “challenges social constructs by inviting users to physically transgress them.”

“One of the main objectives of the award is to help the creators of the projects to experiment and innovate.”

Eurimages programme manager Sergio Garcia de Leaniz told us he was delighted with the impact of the New Lab Awards so far. “One of the main objectives of the award is to help the creators of the projects to experiment and innovate as well as finding their audiences,” he said. “The selection of projects supported in 2024 at major international festivals speaks for itself, while the quality of the projects selected by the initiatives hosting them in 2025 has improved even further.”

Winning the Eurimages New Lab Outreach Award in particular was an indication of the expanded thinking the team have towards distribution. Next on the agenda is speaking to institutions like museums or other spaces to look for a permanent home for the work, a search for alternative audiences that was fundamental from the outset and that was emboldened by the Outreach Award. 

“It gave the last push – I think without that, probably the project wouldn’t have launched in the way it did,” concludes Arnaud.

by Fraser White