On 20th July, Mado Kelleyan exhibited her VR film, Stories From My Grandmother’s House during the Royal College of Art (RCA) for RCA2024. Mado is an artist and storyteller from London and studying Information Experience Design MA. The VR experience tells the story of her Palestinian and Armenian family, a way to sit inside heritage and experience it as if it is a memory.
It follows the love story of her Armenian and Palestinian grandparents across the Middle East. Growing up in the diaspora, the project is designed to hold space for her heritage and experience it as if it is a memory, exploring how digital technologies can reconnect communities with lost spaces and cultures.
The audience arrives in a room in her grandmother’s house in Haifa in the 1930s, full of her grandfather’s paintings and decorative elements reconstructed from online and family archives, celebrating the rich cultural heritage of both sides of the family. The room functions a little like Narnia, with the audience able to adventure through different objects into scenes from the family story, from a shipwreck off the coast of Akka in the 1780s to the adoption of her grandfather in Aleppo during the Armenian Genocide in 1915, through to her grandparents meeting by chance in Haifa in 1932.
Her work uses immersive technologies such as VR & AR to create portals – interventions in physical and digital environments designed to hold space for under-represented stories from human and non-human worlds. Powerful but empathetic, her work focuses on knowing through feeling, engaging audiences with alternative ways of understanding the world through rich, multi-sensory experiences that audiences remember long after they leave. She has exhibited at the London Festival of Architecture & SXSW and has over ten years of experience delivering projects for clients such as The Smithsonian, Bestival, IKEA and Amazon.
You can follow her on Instagram: @studio_oriel
