Imaginary Folk

Drawing from visual fragments associated with multiple cultures across the world, the series constructs rituals that appear documented but were never performed. Its figures seem to belong to a specific place, community, and historical moment, yet no village remembers them, no calendar contains their ceremonies, and no tradition has passed them down.

Here, artificial intelligence operates as a dream engine of cultural recombination, drawing from what might be called the Collective (Selective) Unconscious. Its training data contains fragments of human mythology, anthropology, cinema, tourism, fashion, colonial archives, and contemporary image culture. But this visual memory is neither complete nor neutral. It reflects what was photographed, preserved, labelled, published, and made accessible, while reproducing the biases, omissions, and power structures embedded within those choices.

The resulting folklore occupies an unstable space between recognition and invention. Every figure seems to come from somewhere, but that somewhere disappears when we try to locate it. The series does not propose new traditions or attempt to reproduce existing ones. Instead, it examines how easily the appearance of tradition can be manufactured. A mask becomes evidence of belief. An ornament suggests lineage. A repeated gesture begins to resemble ritual. Photography does not merely record the fiction. It gives the fiction historical weight.

In this tension between document and hallucination, authenticity becomes a visual performance. The flash reveals and fabricates at the same time. The grain gives age to what has no past. The masks conceal individual faces while exposing our desire to recognize meaning, ancestry, and symbolic order. These images do not recover forgotten histories. They demonstrate how convincingly an image can fabricate memory, lineage, and cultural authority.

Across this experimental series, AI becomes a ritual engine: a strange mirror pointed at the collective unconscious.