Masquerade * 2020
Cannes XR – Marché du Film 2020  (Cannes, France)

Masquerade is a VR work conceived as a choreographic archive, an interactive “ritual engine” where intangible heritage is not exhibited, but activated. Built from a hybrid grammar of 360° documentary, volumetric capture, 3D environments, and animation, the piece treats masks and dances as living technologies: systems of memory, trance, community negotiation, and embodied knowledge that can be re-encountered through presence.

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Co-created by Juan Pablo Urgilés, David Lucio, António Baía Reis, Gisela Villanueva, Silvina Feraud, and Gilberto Hernandez, and produced by Imán Transmedia, Masquerade emerged from the development ecology of Cannes XR (Marché du Film) first outlined in an intensive ideation context, then expanded into a full interactive experience that moves between ethnographic texture and game dramaturgy. Rather than “gamifying tradition,” the project asks a more delicate question: what kinds of interaction can hold cultural specificity without flattening it into spectacle?

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Within this framework, António Baía Reis contributed as Research Lead, shaping the project’s conceptual bridge between heritage/history and performing-arts-driven VR design. His role centered on translating context into form: mapping the symbolic logic of festivities (gesture, rhythm, atmosphere, social function) into an interactive language that respects ritual density so that the user’s movement becomes a form of situated listening, and the headset becomes a threshold rather than a screen.

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Masquerade operates like a curated constellation of chapters: each sequence a sensory field where the viewer is invited to cohabit the festival - its masks, bodies, and collective pulse - without collapsing it into tourist consumption. The work positions immersion as a politics of attention: not “wow,” but witness through the body, where choreography becomes a method of cultural transmission.

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Selections / support:

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• Cannes XR – Marché du Film 2020

• IDFA Forum / DocLab 2022

• Virtuality (Buenos Aires) 2020

• VIFF Immersed – Volumetric Market (Kaleidoscope) 2020

• ARTiZEN Grant Winner 2021

• NewImages Festival – XR Development Market (Selected) 2023

• Winner: TAICCA – Innovate Creative Grant for International Co-Production 2024​​