With RE IMAGINE, Medea Electronique Art Collective pivots to a new, urgent narrative: a VR project created with and for children from micro (and excluded) communities (rural areas, remote locations, refugee camps, or urban ghettos).
The project spotlights kids and preteens aged 8–12, children who are invited to claim their voices, manifest their desires, and reimagine their world. This is both a story about their personal lives and a collaborative work of art.
RE IMAGINE poses a fundamental question: What do you imagine for your future? What would you dream? How do you reimagine your living place and life? Through art and play, the project becomes a canvas for kids’ utopias : they become storytellers, weaving visual, auditory, and tactile elements into an immersive VR narrative.
Thus, VR medium is being transformed into a space of radical empathy, allowing the audience to inhabit not just the story but the hope it represents. It is not merely a docufiction but an invitation: step inside the world we can build together.
In this project, Virtual Reality aims to make the transition: take us from “inside the image” and place us “inside the world.” And this is what we want with this specific project: to place the kids and the preteens INSIDE THE WORLD, from which they are or feel “excluded.”
Primary material, collected through workshops, will serve as inspiration and raw material for creating a new story that unifies diverse voices, spaces, and perspectives
The creative foundation of RE IMAGINE emerges from three workshops held in 3 distinct micro-communities:
Sellasia, Greece: A rural village.
Athens: A refugee hub.
Paris Banlieues: Suburban neighborhoods.
Each workshop poses the same challenge: “(RE)Imagine your place (and your life)”—a provocation for children to explore their world and desires through:
Sound Art: Capturing their environment and creating sonic narratives.
Visual Art: Painting and sculpting tangible dreams.
Storytelling: Writing and narrating visions of their future.
The workshops highlight a universal thread of childhood dreams—defiant, hopeful, and unmediated by societal constraints. Yet, they also uncover profound differences shaped by socioeconomic and cultural realities.