A Japanese American artist presented an exhibit of a documentary featuring 360-degree footage of the many places he visited in Venezuela.
Noa Iimura began his journey to Venezuela despite warnings about safety in the country. What was initially planned as a one-month trip turned into a six-month exploration of the country’s people and places.
“I heard very negative things about the country,” Iimura said. “But the Venezuela that I actually got to see was a lot more than just a negative thing.”
More than 50 people attended the two-day event held at Tinker, a Venezuelan restaurant and venue on South Main Street in Gainesville.
Attendees took their seats, put on virtual reality headsets and headphones, and found themselves immersed in the streets and natural wonders of Venezuela with the film “Teleport to Venezuela: Mano Tengo Fe”
For many, it was more than just a visual experience, it was deeply emotional.
Brianna Burke, 21, a criminology and sociology student at the University of Florida, attended the exhibit with her boyfriend, who is Venezuelan.
“It was eye-opening because obviously I’ve never been there,” Burke said. “It gave me a glimpse into life back home.”
Traveling with a 360-degree camera, Iimura captured everything from the world’s tallest waterfall, Angel Falls, to some of the continent’s largest and most dangerous neighborhoods, Petare in Caracas.
The footage was crafted into a 35-minute virtual reality documentary, experienced through 30 headsets available during the exhibit, allowing multiple people to watch at once.
Rodolfo Molina, a research administrator at UF, left Venezuela 27 years ago. He said that attending the exhibit helped him reconnect with his people back home.
“Many of the places he visited are places where I used to live, routes I used to take every day,” Molina said.
The exhibit began in Miami, which has a large Venezuelan population, and Gainesville is one of its stops.
More than 7 million Venezuelans have left their country due to the ongoing socio political crisis, and more than 600,000 now live in the United States.
Jhonatan Charco, the event organizer, is one of the many Venezuelans who had to leave the country. He is now in charge of taking the exhibit across the United States, traveling city to city in a van.
“The magic of virtual reality is that it makes you feel like you’re there. Once you put the VR headset on, you forget about all the distractions,” he said.
Charco added that at every exhibit, Venezuelans tend to feel nostalgic and emotional, but what they all hope for is a “very prosperous Venezuela.”
Iimura said he wanted to reduce misinformation about the country and encourage people to search for their own answers.
“They treated me like family,” Iimura said. “At the end of the day, it’s the people, and how warm everybody was to someone who wasn’t from there.”
The tour will continue along cities on the East Coast.
The exhibit offers members of the Venezuelan diaspora a temporary return home and gives others an innovative way to connect with a country too often misunderstood.
