The Experience Is Virtual. The Terror Is Real.

There’s a scene in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena that is meant to stop your heart. Several scenes, really: The project is a recreation of a showdown at the U.S. border, and it turns terrifying in flash. But the piece—part virtual-reality experiment, part immersive-spectacle video art installation—begins with a sequence that is meant to test your patience.

When visitors arrive at the former church in northeast Washington, D.C., where Carne y Arena (or “Flesh and Sand”) is being staged this summer, they are ushered into a holding cell. The space is cold and sterile, a gray pen with cement floors and a metal bench. Participants are instructed to take off their shoes and socks and put them (and any bags) into a pair of metal lockers. Instructions are piped into the room through an overhead speaker. Then the wait begins: a simulation of the detention that unauthorized immigrants and refugees experience upon their arrival to the border.