Beloved, Toni Morrison’s novel published in 1987, soon became a landmark in the literary representation of the subjective experience of black men and women during and after the period of slavery in the United States. In contrast to the fascination and terror that animate the plot of Sethe, an enslaved fugitive trying to free her children from a life of oppression and forced labor, to the point of her committing an infanticide, there is a minor character, who usually does not receive much attention: Sixo, a slave laboring in the same plantations as Paul D – co-protagonist in the book alongside Sethe –, described as “the wild man”. What is the reason for Sixo’s madness? His insistence on the pursuit of love in the midst of a brutal system. He is in love with a woman who lives many leagues away, referred to in the book simply as the Thirty-Mile Woman.

“Once he plotted down to the minute a thirty-mile trip to see a woman. He left on a Saturday when the moon was in the place he wanted it to be, arrived at her cabin before church on Sunday and had just enough time to say good morning before he had to start back again so he’d make the field call on time Monday morning. He had walked for seventeen hours, sat down for one, turned around and walked seventeen more.”

Dangerous, fleeting, rapturous – love was Sixo’s wildness, lived briefly and without the prospect of lasting, but for which it was worth literally walking. Undesirable and always violable, as enslaved people could be sold and separated at any time, love could only be fleeting and elusive, a small chink through which one could glimpse the possibility of another life. And what if that other life, in the case of a black woman, was dreamed by the side of another woman like her? How many miles would it be necessary to walk to see her smile announcing the coming of a different dawn? In her Álbum de desesquecimentos [Album of Deforgetfulness, 2024], a series of photographs of black women originating from moments of affection and generated by artificial intelligence (AI), visual artist Mayara Ferrão from Salvador, Bahia, seems to tell us that it is time to put our feet up and contemplate scenes of love that we were not even capable of imagining. It does not matter if we cross a river, venture into a forest or walk a long time on a road to meet our beloved. What does matter is to make these moments of love and happiness last, as they interrupt and sabotage the endless exploitation of black bodies and allow us to imagine whole lives. Loved lives.

Known for her work as an illustrator and art director, Ferrão has dedicated herself to investigations that combine research into collections relating to slavery with the manipulation and generation of images using AI. According to her, she intends to construct fictional narratives about moments of affection between black women and reimagine colonial representations, using a speculative exercise that addresses the question: how would it have been if these women could have lived their loves in the past? However, this particular question gets a bold response in her work: these women lived and loved, but their loves became unimaginable in a world marked by white cis-heteronormative supremacy. According to the American writer Saidiya Hartman, in her essay “Venus in Two Acts” (2008), we often come across historical documents concerned with enslaved women “that yield no picture of the everyday life, no pathway to her thoughts, no glimpse of the vulnerability of her face.” There is also no pathway for their black smiles and laughter, including in the immediate post-abolition period, when the black population was seen for a long time almost exclusively through the blinkers of anomy and social marginalization, until the social history of slavery, black activists and intellectuals challenged this vision. With Mayara Ferrão’s art, therefore, another path opens up to the past, and this path is love – a vulnerable, beautiful, modest, living love that needs to be told if it is to exist in our imagination.

Ferrão explains that it all starts with a piece of text – a prompt to the AI system where she describes the image she wants it to produce. This instruction is preceded by an aesthetic and archival search so that the images generated – landscapes, clothes, objects, props – lend historical verisimilitude to a past re-imagined by means of love between black women. More often than not, the accuracy of the image is such that it appears we are looking at a “real” photograph – that’s to say, one taken at the time and not now. However, the degree of historical acuity of the portrait becomes a smaller issue when what is at stake is what Ferrão does with these images. By creating what she calls an “album of deforgetfulness”, framing the photographs, producing postcards, writing statements, letters and poems for the invented archives, she also builds a language of love for this new iconography, weaving them into a verbal fabric of affection. Thinking of the cherished place attrib- uted to photography, which for so long was too inaccessible and expensive to black families, the creation of an album is a gesture of care from those who want these deforgotten images to endure. They remain, therefore, a living archive in which we re-enact, by posing with our loves in the present, unimaginable moments of a desired past – and why not a past that actually happened but was never part of any historical document.

In order to deforget the love between/ of black women, we must also build new memories of what we have never thought could be remembered – that is one of the feelings Ferrão’s work provokes. If remembering is living, memories are also what keeps us alive, on that threshold between what we are able to remember and what we need to imagine so that we can recall what was lived. In the case of black women’s history, there is an abundance of disfigured portraits and gaps which are forever incomplete. A name that is not known to be that of an enslaved woman is a name that is unknown, a depiction of the love between two black women that does not exist is a portrait that does not exist. Nothing can undo this cruel materiality. It is, therefore, by confronting the unavoidable character of loss and absence that the work of Ferrão does not seek to fill such irreparable gaps, but to offer us flashes and glimpses of what could have been whole, free, beautiful and loved lives, as someone who wants to offer a loving and immaterial reparation to ancestral lives – as we see in her film Lua de mel [Honeymoon, 2024], in which different couples of original black women live a love that seemed without a place in history.

Ferrão also produces an iconography for another form of love, the “tough love” – as Toni Morrison would name it in Beloved – of black women for their children, so often desired and equally separated from them, women for whom the struggle for motherhood inspired the search for freedom. In her art, pregnant black women are also deforgotten, and their hands on their bellies and serene expressions allow us to imagine the words they whispered and the songs they sang to cradle the future within themselves. It is these women – and not AI – that seem to give birth to all the deforgetfulness Ferrão’s work promotes, as the American writer Audre Lorde already said: “The Black mother within each of us – the poet – whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.”

By making us experience an undocumented love through AI, the art of Ferrão enhances our ability to imagine not only a future but also a free past, a freedom that may have been lived on a “good day” after a long walk or through caresses exchanged for a few fleeting moments, but which sustained life amid violence. In a context in which the racist bias of AI systems is so discussed, their algorithms encoded mostly by white men, Ferrão is not alone in appropriating a technology that has not been designed for and by black people. A pioneer in the combination of art and technology, African-American artist Stephanie Dinkins has explored the limits and possibilities of AI in the production of images of black women, imagining a technological future in which the black and the female are protagonists. “What does AI need from you?,” Dinkins asks. For Mayara Ferrão, the answer perhaps is: “My love for and to black women.” ///

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Beloved, byToni Morrison (Alfred A. Knopf Inc, 1987)

“Venus inTwo Acts”, by Saidiya Hartman (Small Axe, Indiana University Press, Number 26 [Volume 12, Number 2], June 2008)

“Poetry is Not a Luxury”, by Audre Lorde (Chrysalis: A Magazine of Female Culture, 1987)

Stephanie Dinkins: On Love & Data, Ed. Srimoyee Mitra (University of Michigan Press, 2024)

Mayara Ferrão (Salvador, Bahia, 1993) is a visual artist and filmmaker. She studies visual arts at Federal University of Bahia (UFBA). She directed the film Orixás Center (2021), which won an award at the 5th Mostra Lugar de Mulher é no Cinema.

Fernanda Silva e Sousa (São Paulo, 1993) is a professor and literary critic. She holds a PhD in Literature from the University of São Paulo (USP). She has translated texts by Saidiya Hartman, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Cedric Robinson. Winner of the 6th IMS Serrote Essay Contest in 2023.

Tags: fotografia, Inteligência artificial