nl12 | lab is currently working on The March a virtual reality on the culture of war. Expected Spring 2026
This film shows the working process of the VR The March. Introduction to the team in Amsterdam, clips from inside the VR and our co-operation with Aza Nizi Maza, a studio of artist children in Kharkiv, Ukraine.
The March is a non-linear immersive VR that deals with our relations and responsibilities with war, inequality, violence and social conflict. The experience is about culture and consequences of war in our society. Visitors will find themselves in the shoes of perpetrator, victim and passive spectator. War is close and we’re part of it.
The March is produced for various stages such as museums, media festivals, (media) theatres, but also for schools, libraries and other institutions. With our project we seek a broad collaboration with very diverse disciplines.
The March is intertwined with a multitude of visual narratives. The visual content comes from our homes where we – consciously or unconsciously – keep the remnants of our history. Our (violent) history is hidden in the little statues on our bookshelves, tropical plants in our living rooms and many remnants in the public world around us. In the virtual world objects, photos and other elements merge into a new visual language as a connecting factor. Guided by disparate variations on march music, we wander through the era 1860-2025 with metaphors of winners, losers and victims.
The March is a mirror, not a lesson. By bringing objects and images from our surroundings in a surrealistic environment where it could be interpreted in completely different ways, we give our audience the opportunity to reconsider its value and meaning and afterwards start a search on their own traces of the past. By doing so we put (personal) archives into the centre of our conversation about change. It could encourage us to share and discuss our own images, stories, songs and objects that are hidden in our personal archives and traditions. This could be a starting point for dialogue with others. We might find all sorts of common grounds in where we stand today and can build on for tomorrow.
If we could turn to a mindset that events in history determined the crisis of today we might conclude that we share a responsibility for it. The problems we face in this timeframe are immense and dialogue is our key to survive. History has taught us that blindly following someone who is ‘right’ is a recipe for disaster.
With The March we want to create a tool for dialogue. Not just the people involved like victims, their offspring or sympathisers but especially passive bystanders and also: perpetrators. By being heirs of history and consumers of world trade, we’re all involved and therefore share responsibility. The March wants to open our eyes to these traces, make us realise that even if we experience peaceful times, we should not forget or lose interest in the misery of others. We should be part of an active approach to solve conflict anywhere in our world.
The content of The March is serious and sometimes confronting, still we believe it’s suitable for all audiences, also for children.
For the last scene we work together with Studio Aza Nizi Maza from Kharkiv, Ukraine. The visitor to this scene will travel through their world of experience.
Aza Nizi Maza is a studio for exceptionally talented young artists who draw and paint daily in the basement of a building in the war-ravaged city. The children, aged between seven and sixteen, are mentored by Mykola Kolomiets – a renowned Ukrainian artist who has set aside his own practice to create a sanctuary of creative freedom amidst the chaos of war. Here, these remarkable children give visual form to their experiences and observations.
Kolomiets encourages the children to fully explore their experiences through art, emphasising absolute creative freedom. The results are profoundly moving – a torrent of large-scale drawings and artworks that document their daily reality in the bombarded city. These works provide unique insights into their lived experiences, dreams, fears and personal coping mechanisms, expressing what words cannot capture.
The raw intensity and emotional power of these works surpass anything Leo achieved during his photojournalism career. Through their art, the children of Kharkiv pose a vital question: What is war’s true impact on children?
Aza Nizi Maza featured in The Guardian
The March, scene to scene:
Opening scene: War is represented by six statues representing predators: tigers and lions as the gatekeepers of aspects of war. By touching a statue using a controller, the visitor is taken to a scene. At the end of a scene the statues (minus one) reappear.
The visitor ends up in a landscape of rocks with statues of animals: felines, lions, tigers and panthers. In the virtual space he can touch the animals with his controller so that they lead him to a certain scene. At the end of that scene the predators, minus one, appear again. The order in which the visitor experiences the scenes therefore depends on the choices he makes.
Concrete: About violence and destruction of human societies and nature. The scene has two landscapes and an interior space and deals with the destructive power of war and, in the final landscape, the effect of human actions on nature and the climate. The first landscape shows the ruins of a city with references to destroyed cities such as Grozny or Gaza City. However, the landscape is composed of hundreds of amateur photos that residents of Rotterdam took after their city was bombed on 14 May 1940.
Paradise: About colonialism. The visitor can wander through two fictional landscapes that are reminiscent of Indonesia and what the Dutch colonists once called the Dutch East Indies. The landscapes were created by bringing together and merging tropical houseplants with objects and amateur and colonial photography.
Mud: About the loss of human lives and the traumatic effect of war on children. Two scenes, first underground, then opening onto a valley, are populated by hundreds of statues created by AI-enhanced photos of soldiers and civilians into 3D. The portraits of soldiers were once, around the time of the First World War, made in photo studios as a reassurance to the home front. The Valley scene is inspired by a video posted on Instagram that an aid worker in Gaza made from his car of large groups of children standing beside the road.
Shore: is about European colonialism in Africa and the Caribbean, slavery and displacement. Objects that originated in the former colony and are kept in European houses and museums, come together with (anthropological) photography and amateur photography, often with a racist charge.
Cristal: About the exploitation and appropriation of nature, animals and humans in Western museums and zoos.
Ice: reflects on the cold war and the idea of an enemy. The landscape is built from amateur pictures made in the Soviet Union in the period 1920-1980 and with material from the period when Leo was a photojournalist 1987-2003.
Color: in this scene we look at the present and the future. When the first six scenes have been completed, a new, completely different animal appears. It is made by children from Kharkiv, Ukraine. This animal takes the visitor into their inner world. The visitor to this scene will travel through their world of experience. This is the scene made with the children of Aza Nizi Maza.
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