We present Once Upon A Garden by Linda Dounia (
@LindaDouniaR), a significant body of work engaging AI, archives, and the politics of memory.
Curated by Farrah Carbonell (
@FARRAHXYZ), founder of
@artandvault, a curatorial program focused on digital art and contemporary image practices, in collaboration with
@museframe and
@theHUGart. Powered by
@Art_Domains.
Once Upon A Garden is a speculative archive of critically endangered and extinct flora from the Sahel region of West Africa, where little to no visual record exists. Using AI trained on fragmented and incomplete datasets, Dounia reconstructs possible histories of lost species, producing images that exist between memory, data, and invention.
Developed between 2021 and 2024, the project unfolds across five chapters, tracing both the evolution of the work and the increasing capacity of generative AI models to synthesize images from context. The works do not function as documentation, but reveal how data shapes what can be seen, remembered, and produced.
At its core, the project positions AI as a memory system shaped by human bias, omission, and uneven archives. From a Senegalese-Lebanese perspective, Dounia addresses gaps in global datasets and constructs her own archives, reframing image-making as a form of resistance against erasure.
Situated within contemporary digital and generative practices, the work examines authorship, perception, and the conditions of image production in the age of AI.
Dounia was named to the TIME100 AI list (2023) and received the Mozilla RISE25 Award (2024). Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the California African American Museum (PST ART), KIKK Festival, Bright Moments Paris, and ART X Lagos.
Once Upon A Garden was developed in collaboration with
@fellowshipai,
@artxcode_io, and Alejandro Cartagena
@halecar2 .
This program brings together artists engaging AI, generative systems, and contemporary image-making through distinct visual languages.