Awavena was made by Emmy and AACTA award-winning artist and director Lynette Wallworth, and screened to international acclaim at the 2018 Venice International Film Festival. It had its Melbourne debut at ACMI in 2019. The second in a series of VR works by Lynette Wallworth and producer Nicole Newnham (Collisions was the first and exhibited at ACMI in 2016), Awavena is a stunning tale of metamorphosis in the Brazilian Amazon.
For the Amazonian Yawanawa, “medicine” has the power to take you inside a vision to a place you have never been. By collaborating with artist Lynette Wallworth, Hushuhu, the first woman shaman of the Yawanawa is able to use VR like medicine to open a portal to another way of knowing. Awavena is a collaboration between a community and an artist, melding technology and transcendent experience so that a vision can be shared, and a story told of a people ascending from the edge of extinction.
Wallworth was invited by the Yawanawa to create this stunning VR experience using cutting edge technology to mirror their vision states. Awavena was an unmissable experience and a gift from the Yawanawa that they hoped would shift our consciousness and change the way we perceived the world and the decisions we make.