AI to rethink the past.
“Juana y Josefa” photography series. Concept and co-creation using a text-to-image model.
I wanted to explore #artificialintelligence systems, not just as tools to design the future but to think about the past.
My mother, her mother and the mother of her mother were born in a small village in southern Spain. As most women who lived in this country during the post-war and dictatorship period, they were not allowed to go beyond what society expected from them despite the fact that some of them were ahead of their time. Everyday life was shaped by the new social “moral order” that arose from Franco's victory in the Spanish Civil War, forcing women into an obedient secondary role. “ Women should be modest. Clothing should cover the female form. Women should be discreet in public ”
I´ve used the #ai systems to imagine two friends, Juana and Josefa, being creative, different and unconventional in rural Spain during the 40s and 50s, under the eyes of fashion photographers such as Horst P. Horst, Irving Penn or Helmut Newton.
These are part of the results, related to how the program interprets hundreds of iterations of different inputs/prompts.
Awarded the Pilar Juncosa & Sotheby’s Edition Award (2024) by Miró Foundation.
