VR ZONE – ANIMAPHIX 2026

Once again, Animaphix – New Contemporary Languages Film Festival dedicates a special section to virtual reality works, one of the most significant technological frontiers of contemporary cinematic experience. As cinema continues to intersect with visual arts and interactive practices, virtual reality opens up new possibilities for expanding and redefining the relationship between the spectator and the artwork, transforming viewing into an immersive, participatory, and multisensory experience. More than a technological innovation, VR invites us to reflect on the ways we inhabit images and engage with art, questioning established forms, languages, and modes of perception.

The two works featured in the Animaphix 2026 VR Zone are both surprising immersive journeys into distant artistic and cultural worlds, transforming history, tradition, and visual heritage into profoundly contemporary experiences.

On the one hand, Dance Dance Dance – Matisse, created by artists Agnès Molia and Gordon, invites audiences to step inside the creative universe of Henri Matisse, offering a privileged encounter with the painter’s artistic process. The experience unfolds through some of his most celebrated works devoted to dance—including La Danse, La Danse de Merion, La Danse inachevée, and La Danse de Paris—guiding visitors through a virtual environment where painting, movement, and the human body merge into a single immersive sensory experience. Born in 1869 and deceased in 1954, Henri Matisse was one of the defining figures of twentieth-century art. As one of the founders of Fauvism, he revolutionized modern painting through his groundbreaking exploration of colour, light, and space, extending his artistic practice to sculpture, drawing, printmaking, and the celebrated papiers découpés of his later years.

On the other hand, Boris Labbé’s Ito Meikyu welcomes visitors into a vast animated digital fresco that unfolds as a fluid and ever-changing virtual universe. Its title evokes the image of a “labyrinth of threads,” a structure in which opposing concepts continuously intertwine and collide: interior and exterior, transparency and opacity, exhibitionism and voyeurism, femininity and masculinity. Within this six-degrees-of-freedom virtual environment, existence is imagined as a cosmic loom where the fabric of life is woven through countless branching paths and invisible threads. More than a virtual environment, Ito Meikyu offers a contemplative experience, encouraging audiences to lose themselves within a space suspended between mythology, philosophy, and digital art.