Carola Bonfili. ‘The Stone Monkey’

The Stone Monkey is a work developed through two forms of media narrative: a CGI video trailer and a navigable VR environment that recounts the journey of a small monkey who suddenly witnesses certain parts of its body undergoing a slow process of petrification without any apparent reason and embarks on an initiatory path of healing. The work is part of Second Order Reality, a project that envisions the construction of a work in the form of a videogame inspired by the text La Tentation de Saint Antoine by Gustave Flaubert. The interest in the book stems from the description of the repeated hallucinatory states experienced by its protagonist, Saint Antoine Abbé. These liminal states can be associated, in some aspects, with virtual experiences where the perception of the body and that of the surrounding environment are presented in altered ways. The resulting story also stems from a collaboration with a group of children through workshops and explores the potential of the virtual to engage the visitor in a hybrid perceptual experience.