This project investigates the persistence of dreams as a sensitive territory of history. Through the intersection of archival photographs from the early twentieth century — a period marked by the First and Second World Wars, the Spanish flu pandemic, the Russian Revolution, the 1929 economic crisis, and their unfolding consequences of hunger, poverty, and unemployment — and dream accounts originating from the same historical context, the images presented here do not seek to reconstruct the past, but to fabulate its ruins.

Nourished by these two types of traces — the photographic document and oneiric memory — artificial intelligence operates as a machine of historical imagination. The generated images belong neither entirely to the past nor to the present: they are unstable, fragmented landscapes, traversed by atmospheres of collapse, displacement, loss, and suspension.

Dreams, traditionally understood as expressions of the individual unconscious, are here approached as manifestations of a collective unconscious shaped by wars, health crises, economic collapses, and profound political ruptures, such as the emergence of the Soviet Union and the consolidation of the Cold War through the formation of the so-called Iron Curtain. The anxieties inscribed in these accounts — fear, displacement, ruin, silence, devastation — resonate in unsettling ways with the contemporary world, marked by new wars, the recent trauma of the pandemic, the intensification of climate crises, and global geopolitical instability.

Within this context, the project aligns itself with a contemporary reactivation of the surrealist spirit, not as a formal style, but as a strategy for confronting reality through delirium, fabulation, and a rupture with the modern logic of the image as proof. Here, photography abandons its status as a stable document and asserts itself as a field of instability, reinvention, and imagination.

Between archive and dream, between ruin and invention, between history and desire, the images construct a territory in which the past is not something concluded, but a living material that returns deformed, ghostly, and insistent — like a dream that crosses generations and continues to rewrite itself in the present.

 

​