Building Frida Kahlo’s Red House in Decentraland
We teamed up with Ezel to create a replica of Casa Roja in Decentraland, Frida Kahlo’s childhood house. Check it out!
Hi there, Metaverse citizens!
We’ve recently teamed up with Web3 company Ezel to build a replica of Frida Kahlo’s childhood home and create an interactive journey where users learn about Frida’s life and her most influential artworks.
The house, known as Casa Roja, features a quest-like game experience and audiovisual material where visitors can learn about Frida’s work in both English and Spanish.
This Metaverse experience also showcases a series of unpublished drawings from Frida and many stories about the Mexican artist’s life that have never been revealed before.
The gallery was inaugurated in August and presented during Decentraland’s Art Week. If you want to, you can visit this building here.
Project Information
- Project name: Frida Kahlo: An existential Journey
- Client: Ezel
- Launch date: 24/08/2022
- Launch Event: Decentraland Art Week
- Type of building: Real-life house replica, Gamified experience, Biographic
- Size: 3x3
- Virtual World: Decentraland
- Address: https://play.decentraland.org/?realm=hephaestus&position=53%2C95&island=Iaihl
- Main features of the building: Replica of an existing building (Casa Roja), Biographic journey, Quests, Audio narration in English and Spanish, Garden, Art on the facade
About Frida Kahlo’s project
For this project, the client’s goal was to create an entertaining and engaging experience for both Decentraland users and Frida Kahlo’s fans worldwide.
Frida Kahlo’s family was directly involved in the project, curating different design concepts and building looks. They wanted to ensure we could show Frida Kahlo’s life and work from an optimistic perspective rather than exploiting the romanticized idea of Frida’s suffering.
To support this goal, we brainstormed different ideas for creating an engaging gaming experience. We designed the various quests for the different target audiences attending the building during Art Week.
After several days working with Ezel and Frida’s family, we refined the looks and the game design to create a unique interactive experience. We are super thrilled with the results.
The Quest — Frida Kahlo: an existential journey
Frida Kahlo: an existential journey features a unique interactive experience for all the users who visit the Red House in Decentraland.
Once inside the house, users can go through a series of quests distributed across the eight rooms of the house. Players must complete each quest to unlock the door to the next room. Quests follow a point-and-click game in first or third-person view.
After completing all the quests and unlocking the rooms, the user can get to the house’s backyard and be greeted by Frida’s avatar.
During Decentraland’s Art Week, players could claim a special POAP badge as a prize for completing the experience.
Users can learn about Frida Kahlo’s upbringing and her first incursions into art by visiting the virtual building. The rooms include a voice-over that narrates fascinating details about Frida’s work, displayed on the house walls.
We decided to include both English and Spanish voice narration and texts to make the experience accessible to users from different countries.
The Red House
The Decentraland’s Red House presents the same colonial style as the real-life Casa Roja. The Metaverse building also features original furniture and decoration items from the early 1900s.
One of this project’s main challenges was creating an exciting experience project that could appeal to many people as possible without making the game tedious or too difficult to complete.
The client wanted to make the project as colorful as possible, keeping a positive and happy atmosphere to portray an aspect of Frida’s life that has never been seen before.
Our goal as a team was to create a project that would differ from the usual feeling of any Frida Kahlo-related initiative or media coverage.
Needless to say, this was done with the feedback and approval of Frida’s family, who were involved in the project from the start.
What this project means to us
Ezel is a Web3 company dedicated to creating cultural and educational experiences for the Metaverse. We are thrilled to have had the opportunity to work with them on this project.
At Voxel Architects, we aim to continually explore new ways to experience art through the Metaverse and Web3 technology.
Without a doubt, being able to contribute to expanding Frida Kahlo’s legacy is part of our vision to make art accessible to everyone.
Learn more about our most recent projects. Visit us 👇
