An amazing project by Ermira Goro, See You in Walhalla is a meditation on new media, identity, videogames, and performance in a technology-saturated world. As Goro writes:
A woman slightly obsessive and familiarly lonely plays a new video game – Walhalla. She creates her avatar and guides her through various journeys taking place in an imaginary cityscape, game environment composed of real, urban imagery. While looking for an alternative way of surviving the density, danger and psychosis of urban existence, the player experiences a series of physical and psychic dissociations and becomes herself an imaginary avatar within a real environment, a real city. Both of the roles represent the subjective perception of reality, interpreted through our own desires, fears and misconceptions. So Walhalla – the mythic land of Viking warriors – becomes the battlefield of contemporary urbanity. The performance aims to provoke the audience to notice the uneasy relations between avatars and real people and to pose the question of who finally has control: the player of the game or the game itself?
See You in Walhalla was presented in 2007 in various European art festivals.
Ermira Goro is a dancer and an artist. She started dancing at Art Lyceum of Albania and graduated from the Greek National School of Dance. With scholarships from Koula Pratsika Foundation and Greek State Scholarships Foundation (IKY) she continued her studies in New York where she collaborated with international dance companies and created her first choreographic works.
LINK: Ermira Goro
Submitted by Matteo Bittanti
