Despierta
César Loayza
Advisor: Luisa Pereira
How can an intimate, immersive story contribute to others' healing journeys of inner child wounds? "Despierta" is my personal and emotional story about reconnecting with your inner child. It explores waking up from being kidnapped by family wounds and constant external battles. Let's cheer together for our survival.
Abstract
Despierta is a 7-minute art piece that can be experienced through a virtual reality (VR) headset that immerses you in a multimedia (visual and sound) non-linear radial structure story. Mixing surrealism and South American magic realism, the story connects the subconscious and reality through the memory of family archives, personal objects, curated music, and 3D environments.
After years of external battles that I won, I am privileged to enroll in an internal journey to learn to manage my family wounds, especially abandonment, inherited in my family through generations that didn’t have the chance to work on because they were focused on surviving as a low-income family that finally climbed to the Peruvian middle class with my father efforts.
In these 2 years at ITP master program I was able to learn more about myself and gain new tools, through therapy, to know how to manage the fire inside of family wounds. I did this “Despierta” to share my healing journey out loud so others with similar wounds don’t die in silence.
Technical Details
“Despierta” was made with Unreal Engine 5.3 and 3D assets I built in this IDE, downloaded from sketchfab.com,[m](http://sketchfab.com) and arranged to fit the story I wanted to tell.
To tell the story, people use a Quest 3 Headset to navigate the different environments. I chose this medium because of the organic movement and point of view. I tried desktop/laptop as a medium, but I lost the movement and point of view, especially when I wanted people to explore.
Research/Context
“Despierta” integrates my different tastes for art and artists who have inspired me before and during my ITP journey.
My main inspirations were:
- Alberto Mielgo’s work tells stories from the perspective of the loser and talks about deep content for adults.
- Satoshi Kon’s anime and manga speak about the mix of the subconscious and reality, creating characters who live with struggle, something that my “Despierta” captures. Also, Satoshi’s transitions are exceptional and smooth, full of contrast, which inspired me to build tension in the transitions of scenes.
- Books like “The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics” by Arthur W.Frank, “It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are, and How to End the Cycle” by Mark Wolynn, and “Loose Ends” by James Hillman informed me more about the inner-child, family wounds, and trauma to be more intentional in talking about trauma in “Despierta.” “On Becoming: Finding your Artist Voice” Class by Tanika I. Williams helped me connect the dots about my aesthetics and be intentional in my art piece's surrealism and magic realism.
- In terms of story structure, the books “Immersive Storytelling for Real and Imagined Worlds: A Writer’s Guide” by Margaret Kerrison and “Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative” by Jane Allison, informed me to build an immersive story, including a physical installation where the VR headset lays and informed me by new storytelling structures that fit better with trauma, like the explode or radial structure. Professors Marianne Petit, Sharon De La Cruz, and Jonathan William Turner were big influences in this storytelling journey.
- Ruben Blades is one of my favorite artists, so I learned from his music how to tell family stories and enjoy the street as a place of freedom. At the same time, the “Medium of Memory” Class by Simone Salvo gave me more knowledge on how to use objects to share personal and global stories, objects that have attached memories.
Further Reading
Portfolio: https://cesar-loayza-portfolio.super.site