February 23-27, 2026 · The Bubble, EL3249, Riddell Library, Mount Royal University. A week-long immersive XR exhibition bringing participants into a modular archive of everyday life, cultural memory, and destruction in Gaza through 360-degree video, interactive environments, and spatialized storytelling.
The Canadian premiere brought an internationally touring XR project into a campus setting where technological immersion became a medium for encountering Gaza as lived place rather than distant abstraction.
The Phoenix of Gaza XR is a module-based immersive exhibition built from 3D environments, images, video, and 360-degree recordings. Its materials move through public squares, streets, schools, universities, cafes, markets, beaches, agricultural areas, religious sites, weddings, stitching workshops, dabke, palm harvesting, pottery, and other forms of everyday cultural life. The experience also confronts participants with images and recordings of places transformed or destroyed by Israel's war on Gaza.
At MRU, visitors booked 45-minute sessions in The Bubble on the third floor of Riddell Library. Technical support was present to help participants use the headsets and navigate the experience, while the exhibition invited visitors to move at their own pace between interactive and less technically demanding modes of viewing.
The participant guide distributed for the exhibition organized the experience around the Phoenix of Gaza XR App and five 360-degree video works, ranging from everyday recreation and urban movement to historical sites, displacement, and destruction.
A multidimensional Unreal Engine environment combining 3D models with images and videos of monuments, cultural sites, schools, streets, cafes, beaches, markets, weddings, craft practices, and other spaces of social life.
Children play amid rubble in Gaza City during Eid al-Fitr. The short 360-degree work places celebration, childhood, and the material conditions of war in the same field of view.
Scenes from Gaza City Beach, a clown entertaining children, poetry recitals, Palestinian traditional dancing (dabke), and a bachelor party recorded during 2022.
A moving tour through Unknown Soldier Square in Al-Rimal and along Al-Rashid Street, following one of Gaza's major roads beside the Mediterranean.
The Church of Saint Porphyrius, the Great Omari Mosque, Hamam al-Sammara, and the Pasha's Palace Museum appear as cultural and historical sites whose later destruction becomes part of the work's record.
Mohammed, a 12-year-old, roller skates through Beach Camp in footage recorded in early 2022. The guide notes that the later soundtrack incorporates sounds recorded during the war.
visitors across five days
The Canadian premiere welcomed more than 400 visitors over the course of the week, including many members of Calgary's Palestinian community. For some, the virtual environments offered an unexpectedly intimate encounter with streets, neighbourhoods, and places remembered from childhood that they understood to have since been destroyed or transformed beyond recognition.
Class visits also created opportunities for students and instructors to approach a deeply sensitive and often polarizing political issue through historical context, immersive media, facilitated discussion, and reflection. Several instructors reported that the experience opened honest conversations that might otherwise have been difficult to initiate. For the organizers, the week affirmed that institutional neutrality need not mean avoiding difficult issues; it can also mean creating careful conditions in which they can be engaged with evidence, sincerity, and respect.
Nada El-Borrno joined the Canadian premiere as its Research Assistant. Alongside supporting the exhibition's coordination and public engagement, she encountered the project through her own Palestinian family history and through her training in psychology and counselling.
"In a small way, I helped bring Gaza to them."Nada El-Borrno · Project Research Assistant
For Nada, the exhibition became both an educational experience and a form of reconnection. Sharing it with her parents and relatives who had lived in Gaza gave the archival project a deeply personal register, while reinforcing for her the importance of preserving memory and creating spaces in which people can feel heard and recognized.
“I was brought onto the Phoenix of Gaza XR experience as a research assistant, which was an invaluable educational and professional opportunity for me. Having completed my Bachelor of Arts in Psychology degree and with a Master’s in Counselling Psychology underway, this experience shifted my outlook on empathy, narrative, and the importance of creating spaces for individuals to feel heard and validated. As a whole, this immersive experience allowed me to engage with storytelling, memory, and lived experiences on both intellectual and emotional levels.
From a more personal perspective, as a Palestinian from Gaza, seeing the city again, even in this format, was incredibly surreal. It is a cherished memory that allowed me to reconnect with a part of my identity that I have deeply missed. Additionally, sharing this experience with my family, including my parents, as well as my cousin and her parents who lived in Gaza their whole lives and just recently moved to Calgary, was equally meaningful for me. In a small way, I helped bring Gaza to them, and their responses, emotions, and recollections highlighted the powerful nature that this kind of technology and archival showcase truly holds.
The Phoenix of Gaza is a very heartfelt reminder of why we need to preserve the past and share stories, which must be done deliberately and with humanity. I am deeply thankful to have been part of this experience and to the team behind the Ethnographic Research and Practice Lab for making it available to our Mount Royal community.”
The week extended beyond the headsets through installation materials, memorial displays, informal conversation, and participant response in the public spaces around The Bubble.
Participants were explicitly invited to leave impressions after viewing. These handwritten responses became a second-order record of the exhibition: not part of the XR work itself, but evidence of how viewers encountered its images, sounds, histories, and emotional demands.
The feedback surface accumulated short observations, fragments, political statements, expressions of grief, and reflections on memory and representation. In that sense, the exhibition's public archive continued outside the headset, through the language visitors used to register what they had seen.
Watch a short video produced by student volunteer Dan Alghussein.
Watch video News coverage Calgary JournalRead coverage of the Canadian premiere and its interdisciplinary work at MRU.
Read coverage Project creators The Phoenix of Gaza XRVisit the project's official site and explore the creators' account of the XR archive.
Visit projectThe week concluded with an online conversation with the project's co-creators, moderated by Gabriela Perdomo Páez, Assistant Professor of Journalism at Mount Royal University, shifting the exhibition from immersive encounter toward direct discussion of its making, circulation, and role in preserving memory and resilience in Palestine.
The conversation offered an opportunity to ask how immersive media can work across testimony, preservation, pedagogy, and public memory - and how a project developed around Gaza changes as it travels between institutions and audiences.
The MRU exhibition was organized by George Mantzios, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Mount Royal University; Gloria Pérez-Rivera, Assistant Professor in Sociology & Anthropology at Mount Royal University; and Gabriela Perdomo Páez, Assistant Professor of Journalism at Mount Royal University, with the Ethnographic Research & Practice Lab serving as an anchor for the collaboration. Riddell Library supported the exhibition's spaces, equipment, and logistics, while the participant framework connected technical facilitation to reflection and access to support.
The project brought together anthropology, journalism, library infrastructure, immersive media, and public programming. More than 400 visitors encountered the exhibition across the week. Its pedagogical premise was not that XR could substitute for historical understanding, but that immersive media could become one component of a scaffolded encounter: contextual preparation before the headset, guided navigation during the experience, and discussion and reflection afterward. Instructors who brought classes to the exhibition reported that this structure helped open thoughtful conversations around questions that can be difficult to approach in conventional classroom settings.
We gratefully acknowledge the student volunteers; the staff of Riddell Library; Ahlam Muhtaseb, Naim Aburaddi, and their team at The Phoenix of Gaza XR; and the Faculty of Arts Endeavour Fund for making the Canadian premiere possible.
