Phantom Relics: Speculative Geographies in Virtual Reality

Abstract

The photo essay delves into the place of particular virtual reality in psychogeography in context of my virtual reality installation project Rivers Have Flowed Where They Buried Us. The fluidity of modern maps lends itself to the deconstruction of the Westcentric academic discipline of cartography that has been the cause of artificial forced colonial borders across the world in which co-cultural spaces have been fragmented. One such space is the India-Bangladesh border, partitioning the Bengali community by the colonial Radcliffe line. This border was the cause of my family’s transgenerational migration, making me a fourth-generation migrant. The research looks into the role of using virtual reality to create a safe space and foster empathy to facilitate intercultural dialogue about the political consequences of such partitions. Moreover, it explores the use of combining speculative fiction, performance, and immersivity with virtual reality cinema to forge a storytelling tool that explores transgenerational trauma and silenced narratives of migration. The urgency of this research lies in the continued porosity of this border space today and the rampant violence of the border forces on civilians, particularly in light of the recent anti-immigration policies and hostility of the Indian government towards Bangladeshi migrants.

Keywords: India-Bangladesh border, intercultural dialogue, migration, psychogeography, virtual reality

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