Essência (Essence) is a 360° VR documentary created in Câmara de Lobos, Madeira (Portugal) in 2019, developed through an arts-based research workshop co-led by António Baía Reis and art curator Michelle Kasprzak. Produced in the charged, almost allegorical setting of the Madeira Press Museum, surrounded by historic printing machines and the material memory of public discourse, the project treated immersive cinema as a curatorial tool: a way of reframing place through presence, and of redistributing authorship toward those who live inside the story.

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The work begins from a subtle cultural paradox. Câmara de Lobos is a fishing town with deep maritime traditions, yet its contemporary tourist image has been increasingly magnetised by a brief historical footnote: Winston Churchill’s visit and painting episode. Over time, that fragment hardened into a pervasive brand - restaurants, guided tours, souvenirs, viewpoints - an ambient “Churchillmania” that turns a living community into a backdrop for an imported myth. Essência does not simply criticise this phenomenon; it performs a counter-move. It returns the viewer to the town’s textures, its labour, rituals, vernacular knowledge, and everyday rhythms, asking what gets lost when heritage is reorganised around an external gaze.

 

Formally, the project was built through co-creation. A mixed group of University of Madeira Visual Arts finalists and local youth from Câmara de Lobos were introduced to immersive storytelling through first-hand VR viewing and hands-on production, then collectively designed and produced the film in an accelerated cycle (ideation, location shooting, editing, and public presentation). This process is central to the work’s ethics: the piece emerges not as a “film about” a community, but as a film authored with a community, where decisions about what is worth seeing, what should be centered, what should be resisted—are negotiated from within.

 

Essência leverages 360° cinema to shift documentary spectatorship into spatial witnessing. Rather than framing an argument through cuts and close-ups, the film situates the viewer inside the bay and its viewpoints, allowing meaning to be constructed through attention and orientation: where the viewer chooses to look becomes part of the reading. The voice-over, performed by a local participant, functions as a grounded, intimate guide: not a touristic narration, but a lived cadence that reclaims the town’s self-description from the noise of branding.

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Sound operates as a second narrative architecture. The score was conceived as a dialogue between two affective worlds, one echoing the spectacle and cultural ornamentation attached to Churchill’s symbolic presence, and another aligned with the town’s own inheritance, so that the film’s critique is carried not only by words but by musical tension and contrast, shaping the viewer’s emotional understanding of what is being commodified and what endures.

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Essência functions as both artwork and method: a case study in how immersive media can be used to contest heritage narratives, to prototype new forms of participatory authorship, and to generate public reflection on the politics of representation. It proposes 360° documentary not as technological novelty, but as a medium capable of re-sensitising audiences to place, and of asking, with quiet insistence, who gets to define the “essence” of a community.