Duchampiana VR

The nude suspended on a pedestal, the femme fatale descending into madness, the high-school nerd transformed into a prom queen.
Too often female bodies are represented in poses of display. One such pose is the familiar “Woman Descending the Stairs”. Duchampiana VR tells the story of a woman on the day that she decides to turn around and climb. Guiding us ever upwards, into
the midst of a virtual women’s march, this realtime installation culminates in a sensory celebration of sisterhood and allyship.

Pitch

Synopsis

The story begins inside a dim concrete cube where we encounter the majestic figure of Duchampiana. She is superhumanly tall and her body appears carved from solid wood. Like in Marcel Duchamp’s famous painting, her limbs are an assembly of geometrical shapes: cylinders, cones, spheres, crowned with a trapeze-like head. An infinite staircase leads up through an opening in the ceiling, the only source of light in the room, and so our journey begins, ever upward, following Duchampiana on her quest towards empowerment. 

Our progression through the stairs is marked by significant changes in light and weather, which shift the emotional tone of the piece from a darker mood to an increasingly positive space. The further we climb, the more women we encounter. Born from pieces that fall off Duchampiana’s body, they form an ever growing army around us, joining us in our pursuit. As we climb higher and higher, we eventually find ourselves cocooned by a crowd, marching for a cause. An eclectic drumming partition accentuating our step. 

As we break through a final layer of pink and orange clouds, we reach a landing above the clouds where our company of many comes to a halt. The drumming stops and all we hear is the sound of a pleasant breeze enfolding our bodies. Duchampiana steps in front of us, her wooden hues dazzle and dance with life. She places her hands on ours, charging our body with her colour and spirit, as if she was giving us the tools to lead others up through that same path.

An eerie, lo-fi score fills the vastness of the sky, and the crowd of women continue their climb up a now invisible staircase. After bidding us farewell, Duchampiana is the last to join them. The closing credits form the steps she walks on.

Director statement

Follow Duchampiana! – Our main character is inspired by French artist Marcel Duchamp’s Nu descendant un escalier no 2. She is a warrior, an avatar of female empowerment on a quest towards a more just and equal future. She very much resembles the painting, including her oil-on-canvas skin texture.

As a conceptual environment, the world of Duchampiana VR follows this aesthetic, though balancing more on the verge to realism. This piece does not feature spoken language, which makes body language even more important. To have complete control over shaping the powerful stride of our main protagonist, Duchampiana, we plan to either use keyframe animation or to build upon the motion capture recordings of an esteemed female athlete.

The sound of the march: bespoke sound elements and an abstract jazz drumming partition will be composed and spatialised to encourage and inspire the user in his/her progression up to the infinite staircase.

Director biography

Lilian Hess is a director based between Berlin and London. Her work spans a variety of themes from explorations of friendship, migration, to architecture, and she works transmedial. Her graduation film Revising Anneliese, a documentary about a queer post-war fashion designer, was nominated for Best Edit at 2017 BAFTA’s Underwire Festival. Her first venture into VR was as the producer of the acclaimed Cosmos Within Us (2019), nominated for a PGA Award and awarded with the Lumen Prize. Most recently, she was invited to workshop her piece Duchampiana VR at the 2021 Biennale VR College, and she was accepted to the 2022 Berlinale Talents Cohort.

Goals

We are a French-German co-production, with secured development funding in France, and open funding applications in Germany. Our team is mostly secured, though we are interested to speak to installation designers for the distribution stage. Further, we are interested to explore co-production with the Netherlands once we reach the production stage, and we would definitely love to introduce our project to venues, festivals, institutions that may want to showcase Duchampiana VR in 2023. Conversations with potential technical sponsors (for the technical set-up including headset, trackers, lighthouses, PCs) are of great interest to us.