Becoming the unborn
A return to the point before birth — where there is no pressure of choice, no social roles and no imposed imagery.
- Year
- Category
- Installation, XR
- Medium
- Physical installation, VR, AI-generated video
- Residency
- Espronceda Institute of Art & Culture, Barcelona
- Duration
- Four-month international residency, 2025
Background
This project was created as part of a four-month international art residency at Espronceda Institute of Art & Culture, a multimedia art space in Barcelona. The residency brought together artists working at the intersection of art, technology and critical reflection on contemporary reality, providing a framework for investigating instability, acceleration and the transformation of human experience in the digital age.
The installation
The project explores the experience of losing stability in a world that changes faster than a person can adapt. In response to this condition emerges a desire to return to an original point — a state “before birth”, where there is no pressure of choice, no social roles and no imposed imagery. At the centre of the installation is a doll-embryo sealed inside a 19-litre office water bottle filled with a viscous, translucent substance. This is the external, observational layer of the experience. By putting on a VR headset, the viewer shifts into the embryo’s internal point of view: the gallery space becomes visible through a dense, distorted medium, creating a sensory impression of regression — a return to a pre-identity state.
Four perspectives
Surrounding the central object are four mannequins, each embodying a distinct way of perceiving the contemporary world: technological progress, commodification and the corporate gaze, the natural perspective, and a human, vital, maternal mode of perception. These perspectives exist simultaneously in the physical installation and inside the VR environment, allowing the viewer to move between them and compare each with the embodied experience of being the embryo. The work merges physical installation, immersive VR and philosophical reflection on nostalgia, adaptation, identity, and the transformation of human life into image and commodity within the society of the spectacle.
Exhibitions and awards
- AI Design Awards 2026, Palau Dalmases Gallery, Barcelona, Spain
- IMMENSIVA, Espronceda Institute of Art & Culture, Barcelona, Spain