A Speculative Archive
Portraits from Park Abbey
Leuven, Belgium
Enter the CollectionThe Project
Concerning Unknown Women is a project by Ana María Caballero that brings together medieval and early modern literature, archival research, machine learning, portraiture, and poetry to imagine the identities of women recorded in the archives of Park Abbey, a Norbertine monastery founded in 1192.
Across centuries of poems written to commemorate women entering religious life, individual lives are flattened into a singular narrative of devotion, obedience, and renunciation.
The period in question predates photography. Access to lived experience is mediated almost entirely through text and painting: the primary technologies through which identity was recorded and imagined.
The project was presented at the Abbey as part of the exhibition Threading Landscapes, organized to celebrate a sweeping restoration of its grounds.
MoreThe Collection
A custom LLM was trained on both the religious poems in the Abbey’s records and on a corpus of early feminist literature to generate prompts that imagine the women via the visual language of Flemish portraiture.
However, the images subtly depart from the conventions of their era—revealing signs of interior life that institutional records never preserved.
Methodology
For centuries in the Low Countries, poems were written to commemorate women entering religious life. Read together, these texts begin to sound like a single poem. Different names appear, but the same ideals—devotion, obedience, and renunciation—recur.
Working with TITLES as technological partner, Concerning Unknown Women brings these archival records into conversation with a broader corpus of writings by and about women, including works by Christine de Pizan, Hadewijch, Olympe de Gouges, and Mary Wollstonecraft. While the professional poems reduce women to prescribed roles, these texts imagine women as thinkers, writers, rulers, visionaries, and intellectual equals.
Read the MethodologyAn Original Poem
Like the portraits and the website, the poem becomes a vehicle through which women preserved only in institutional records are carried forward through language.