Royal College of Art graduate Marcel/a Baltarete has created a series of short animations depicting themselves as otherworldly beings to alleviate and interrogate their feelings of gender dysphoria.
Gender dysphoria describes the distress that can be experienced by people, whose biological sex and gender identity do not match ? a feeling Baltarete describes as "grief, discomfort and inadequacy all at the same time".
Above: Baltarete's animation shows their avatar with a translucent body. Top video: A Journey of Digital Introspection and Relief II is one of two short films created by the designer
Baltarete, who is nonbinary and uses they/their pronouns, studied fashion at the RCA but changed mediums partway through their graduate degree. Instead, they taught themself how to work with 3D modelling, augmented and virtual reality.
"I started feeling uncomfortable and dishonest with fitting garments on other people's bodies when I realised I didn't have a good understanding of my own body, as the questions around my own gender identity started to surface," they told Dezeen.
"I knew I had to explore these questions on my own body, but doing so in real life would have felt too exposing, so the digital world allowed me to maintain a safe distance."

Baltarete 3D scanned their head to create a virtual avatar of themselves, which is digitally enhanced and animated to transform into virtual beings with fur, translucent horns or impossibly glossy skin.
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