A miniature Art Nouveau villa appears in an undefined virtual space before slowly expanding to full scale. As we enter its rooms and garden, past and present begin to weave together. Our guide is Cecilie Levy, the great-great-granddaughter of Frida Hansen—once an internationally celebrated textile artist, but today largely forgotten.
Archival photographs, an old gramophone and woven artworks become portals into Hansen’s life. We encounter a world shaped by colour, nature and artistic ambition, but also by bankruptcy and profound personal loss. As hardship descends, the lush garden withers into darkness. Four enigmatic female figures emerge from the desolation, leading us towards Semper Vadentes and the beginning of Frida’s artistic awakening.
Across more than a century, the lives of two women from the same family begin to converge. Finding Frida is both an intimate act of remembrance and an exploration of how artistic creativity can transform adversity into enduring beauty. By allowing us to move through Hansen’s art rather than simply observe it, the VR experience asks what happens when a forgotten role model is found again—and how her work may continue to shape the generations that follow.
Director Hilde K. Kjøs combines photorealistic 3D environments, dreamlike projections and animated artworks with an intricate landscape of reworked foley and original music. Voices drawn from interviews with Frida Hansen and historical sources bring documentary traces into an otherwise fluid and imaginative world.