Queer ec(h)o VR * 2021
Container Artistic Residency (UK)
Queer ec(h)o is an experimental VR work by António Baía Reis, developed after receiving Container Magazine’s “Container Artistic Residency” Award (UK, 2021). Conceived as VR performance, experimental film, and social manifesto, the project uses social virtual reality not as a futuristic playground, but as a contested public space, one where intimacy, spectacle, exhaustion, desire, and political urgency are constantly co-present. Rather than “representing” climate injustice, Queer ec(h)o performs it as an affective atmosphere: a lived condition that leaks into conversations, bodies, and the fragile infrastructures that decide who is protected and who is left behind.
At the project’s core is a proposition that refuses neutrality: the climate emergency is not a single catastrophe but a multiplier of existing violence. When safety depends on stable housing, employability, family protection, and social recognition, those already exposed to stigma and exclusion, particularly LGBT+ communities, carry an intensified vulnerability in moments of environmental disruption. Queer ec(h)o insists that the roots of ecological collapse are entangled with the roots of multiple oppressions, and therefore queer liberation must be understood as a structural component of climate justice, not a “parallel cause.” In this framing, justice is not only about carbon and policy; it is also about who is allowed to live, to move, to be believed, and to be cared for when systems start failing.
Formally, the work is built as a three-act arc (Acts I–III) that treats VRChat as both field site and stage. The first act unfolds as netnographic-like fieldwork: Reis enters social VR worlds and engages in random encounters with strangers, catalyzing conversations around climate change and its implications for LGBT+ lives. These interactions are not treated as data to be “extracted,” but as volatile fragments of the contemporary condition - hesitations, contradictions, humour, denial, fear, tenderness - gathered through a digital research journal of notes, images, and recordings. The result is a collage logic: an archive that values mess, rupture, and partiality, because crisis itself is experienced in fragments. From that archive, Act II emerges as the project’s ignition: a solo live performance in VR (also translated into experimental moving image form) where the “virtual body” becomes an unstable instrument, simultaneously vulnerable and theatrical, intimate and hyper-visible. The performance does not aim for polished representation. It stages what could be called aesthetic disaster response: the avatar moves through seemingly artistic chaos while carrying conceptual weight, exposing the contradiction of speaking about planetary collapse inside spaces designed for play, social improvisation, and endless distraction. This is where the work becomes sharply contemporary: it asks what it means to demand justice in environments optimized for spectacle, and whether presence, however synthetic, can still produce responsibility. Act III closes the residency as a reflective, autoethnographic layer: not a “making-of,” but a critical synthesis of method and subjectivity. Here the project becomes explicit about its research stakes: what social VR makes possible (unexpected intimacy, global proximity, participatory liveness), what it distorts (attention, sincerity, scale), and what it reveals about the artist himself as a young queer person navigating the emotional politics of climate discourse. The research is inseparable from the artwork; the artwork is inseparable from the lived pressure of its themes.
Queer ec(h)o proposes social VR as an emergent site for justice-oriented performance, a medium where the politics of climate are not only discussed, but enacted through attention, embodiment, and encounter. It does not offer resolution. It offers friction: between liberation and catastrophe, between desire and grief, between the dreamlike potential of immersive worlds and the brutal asymmetries of the physical one. The work ultimately argues, through form, not slogans, that if climate crisis is also a crisis of care, then art must become a technology of perception: a way of training the public to feel connections that institutions often refuse to acknowledge.