Time-lapse Migration metaverse snapshot
Time-lapse migration: Artists reframing disinformation narratives
Hello! We are La Tempesta: City, culture, technology digital company+ Varvara&Mar artist duo joining forces for the Startup meets Artist track.
We are a multidisciplinary team combining humanistic, artistic, technological and social sciences backgrounds. We speak 6 languages (Spanish, Catalan, English, Estonian, Russian, German and French) and we work respectively from Barcelona and Estonia.
In time-lapse migration, we aim at bringing forward the refugee artists’ voices and their lived experience, to build an alternative narrative that transcends the fear rhetoric and the existing mis/disinformation on refugee and migrant phenomenon. We believe in culture’s elementary function as a critical tool for transformation and thinking. Besides what modern sociology and data analysis can teach us on the subject, artists have a powerful voice and can imagine and create new perspectives, in a language that we all understand.
Time-lapse Migration approach
Migration and disinformation
The first step we undertook, with the collaboration of migration sociology experts, was to conduct an analysis on how disinformation acts over the public discourse on migration. What we were able to verify, is that disinformation narratives in general depict migration as a threat, on several levels. To do that, false information but also misleading or unverifiable distortions are used. Conservative to radical political agendas are thus promoted, and messages are adapted to the news topics and events, in order to maintain their relevancy to the audience’s ears and fears.
The curated section of “Narratives”, aims at critically looking at these constructed distortions by exploring different geographies of the dispute – at the borders, at the everyday life, and the identity – and focusing on the long-term impact of migration.
Why are borders today impregnated with fear and which are the dimensions of the arrivals in Europe?
How does everyday life change with the settlement of migrants and refugees in the host societies?
How does mobility relate to questions of identity and which are the challenges and opportunities that emerge?
A platform for NGOs, cultural institutions and artists
On this basis, an online platform is being developed by La Tempesta to design online narratives and digital art exhibition projects in the web and in the metaverse.
NGOs and migrant/refugee organisations will be able to join Time-lapse migration platform bringing a team of collaborating artists, achieving visibility and a fair trade alternative for artists artwork, allowing income for artists and NGO’s, through NFTs. Each exhibition in Time-lapse migration represents a different collaboration and creates a unique emotional user journey.
Further usage – beyond Time-lapse migration project- of the platform developed, will give different cultural institutions (museums, galleries, associations,) and artist collectives the power to easily deploy narratives and create online exhibitions on the web and cultural representations on the metaverse, and also monetise the artworks through NFTs.
All modalities can include the monetisation of the artistic work, through Tezos green NFTs.
This way, the platform aims at achieving a sustainable operational model that invites NGOs, cultural institutions, and artists to participate and, at the same time, enables income channels.
First exhibition in progress…
The first, pilot exhibition, curated by the artists Varvara & Mar, is already in progress, with the collaboration of Artists against war, an Ukranian artists NGO.
The exhibition brings together artworks by established Ukrainian artists. The medium is very diverse in the virtual show: from traditional painting format to the latest 3D digital sculpture. However, all the artworks talk about the topic of misinformation and disinformation in the Ukrainian moment from different angles, giving the artists a voice to untangle these complex themes through their evoking narratives of the art pieces.
The artists accepted the challenge to participate in the premier metaverse exhibition released as NFTs in Objkt.com using the Tezos blockchain.