Concerning Unknown Women — Portraits from Park Abbey

The Project

Concerning Unknown Women is a project by Ana María Caballero ↗ that begins with poems preserved in the archives of Park Abbey, written to commemorate women entering religious life.

Across different names and dates, these texts repeatedly describe women through the same prescribed ideals of devotion, obedience and renunciation. Individual lives disappear into a shared language.

The title Concerning Unknown Women evokes Giovanni Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris (Concerning Famous Women, c. 1361–62), a collection of 106 biographies of notable women. Caballero turns instead to women whose names survived, but whose individual lives remain largely unknown.

The period predates photography. Access to these women’s lives is mediated largely through text and painting.

Created for Threading Landscapes ↗ at Park Abbey’s Museum PARCUM, the project asks what remains of a person when history preserves her name but little of her self.

A video work follows a professor of early modern literature encountering the archive for the first time, turning the act of navigating a website into a contemporary form of readership.

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Maria Isabella Joris, 1743·Wittevrouwen Convent, Leuven.

The Collection

Imagined Portraits

The women pictured here are drawn from names preserved in Park Abbey’s archives. Their portraits are imagined.

Created using a custom model developed in partnership with TITLES ↗, the images are rooted in Flemish portraiture but alter its conventions. The women read, write, study, observe and make.

Research into the religious communities named in the records informs how each woman is dressed. Habits, veils, wimples, fabrics, colors and other details are based on the convent, abbey, order or beguinage she entered, and on the period in which she lived.

The portraits do not propose historical likenesses. They offer each woman a semblance of self beyond the language through which she was preserved.

Christina Vandr Buecken

1730 · Great Beguinage of Leuven

Maria Christina van der Maesen

1779·Great Beguinage of Leuven

Anna Cristina van Leeuw

1786 · Great Beguinage of Leuven

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Methodology

Reading the Archive

Read together, the poems preserved at Park Abbey begin to sound like a single poem. Different names appear, but the same ideals of devotion, obedience and renunciation recur.

Concerning Unknown Women places these records alongside centuries of writing by and about women. Presented as a bibliography within the installation, these texts provide another lens through which the archive can be read.

The project extends this question of readership into the present. In an accompanying video work, a professor of early modern literature navigates the speculative museum website for the first time. She encounters the archive through a lifetime of reading, including the texts gathered in the project’s bibliography.

Her reading moves between text and image, archive and interface. Clicking, scrolling, pausing and returning turn the private act of reading into a public performance.

Read the Methodology

Room for Concerning Unknown Women, Park Abbey, Leuven. Courtesy Museum PARCUM

Contemporary Readership

The Poem

Caballero’s original poem voices the internal monologue of a professor of early modern literature encountering the speculative archive for the first time.

She brings a lifetime of reading to the encounter. The project’s bibliography informs how she reads the women, their portraits and the language that preserved them.

As she moves through the website, her encounter shifts from the women before her to questions about her own identity: What can a record tell us about a person? How might each of us be read by someone who comes after us? How, indeed, can we read ourselves?

Read the Poem

Manuscripts from Park Abbey’s archives. Courtesy of the artist.

ConcerningUnknown Women