eNewMexican

All Her Bodies

VIRTUAL REALITY ENVIRONMENTS, 360°

Elizabeth Leister’s virtual reality environment, All Her Bodies, uses your gaze to choose one of five women. Stare at one of them longer than the others and you will be transported to her private, post-apocalyptic nowhere-space of abstract architectural lines. Colors are saturated yet smoky — violet, indigo, orange — and scraps of paper drift downward, covered in cursive scrawls.

“I’m a passenger in the car,” says one of the women, relating a dream. “The driver is my uncle. My neighbor. My brother’s friend. A stranger. My teacher. My sister’s husband.” Another woman sets the scene for a monologue about not being able to have children. “Seated at a table, in the house, isolated, deep in the woods, I had already stopped bleeding.”

Leister, who lives in Los Angeles, wrote the harrowing fragments of poetry based on her own experiences, as well as those of friends. She cast actresses of different ages and races to embody the work. “The project came out of the #MeToo movement, and the fact that it didn’t stay in the news cycle. It was an effort to keep telling these stories, [and to show] the way that women who go through these types of experiences hold the trauma in their bodies. In a way, I’m trying to elicit that in the audience, to feel something very viscerally.”

All Her Bodies was created for a complete virtual reality experience with a headset, but it can also be viewed as a 360-degree video. The 360 version is preprogrammed, rather than connected to the viewer’s gaze, but is otherwise comparable.

— Jennifer Levin

RANDOM ACTS

en-us

2021-06-18T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-06-18T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://enewmexican.com/article/281681142832922

Santa Fe New Mexican