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 Park Abbey's archives.
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 develops a custom language model trained on both the Abbey's records and a broader corpus of early feminist writing. Included in this corpus are texts such as Giovanni Boccaccio's De mulieribus claris (Concerning Famous Women, 1361), Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), and Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).
Together, these sources place competing ideas of womanhood into dialogue: while some women were being praised for renouncing the world, others were rewriting its terms. The language model generates a series of imagined portraits of women named in the archives. Inspired by Flemish portraiture, the images subtly depart from its conventions through gaze, expression, gesture, and signs of interior life.
The portraits are presented through a speculative museum website: a digital collection dedicated to women who never entered the canon of art history. Neither fact nor fiction, the site functions as an alternative archive through which women preserved only in institutional records are encountered again. At the center of the project is an original poem written by Caballero. Like the portraits and the website, the poem becomes a form of archival preservation, carrying these women forward through language.
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.
A custom LLM is trained across both bodies of material, using the tension between them as a generative space. The resulting texts inform a series of imagined portraits presented through this speculative museum website. Rooted in the visual language of Flemish portraiture, the images subtly depart from the conventions of their era, revealing signs of interior life.
The Poem
An original poem written by Ana María Caballero accompanies the portraits and website. Together, the portraits, website, and poem form a series of interconnected records through which these women are encountered anew.
The Corpus
The custom language model is trained across two bodies of material held in deliberate tension. The first consists of the Abbey's own records: admission poems, account books, lists of the sick and the dead, procurement documents. The second draws from a wider tradition of writing by and about women spanning four centuries.
This wider corpus is organized around three layers, each representing a distinct relationship between women and the written record.
Layer I — Women Writing Themselves
Texts by women from the medieval Low Countries and its theological milieu: Hadewijch of Antwerp, Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, Marguerite Porete. These are women who wrote from within religious life, shaping a language of interior experience and spiritual authority that the Abbey's admission poems, by contrast, systematically suppress.
Layer II — Women Against Erasure
Works that respond to the erasure of women from historical record: Giovanni Boccaccio's De mulieribus claris (1361), Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), and its companion text, Le Trésor de la Cité des Dames. These works construct alternative archives — catalogues of women whose accomplishments have been omitted or diminished by history.
Layer III — Women as Thinkers, Leaders, and Agents
Texts that argue, often directly and urgently, for the intellectual and civic equality of women: Mary Astell, Margaret Cavendish, François Poullain de la Barre, Olympe de Gouges, Judith Sargent Murray, Mary Wollstonecraft, Margaret Fuller. Placed against the Abbey's admission records, these texts make audible a counter-tradition that was always present — if not always in the same room.
The Installation
The installation is conceived as a living research environment in which the project's mechanisms remain visible. A large table brings together archival documents, historical texts, handwritten notes, and a custom language model, while a projector/screen displays a series of AI-generated portraits inspired by women found in the Park Abbey archives.
Together, these elements foreground the layered construction of identity across centuries, making visible the relationship between historical documentation, interpretation, and representation.
Concerning Unknown Women is part of Threading Landscapes, an exhibition curated by Ana Sokoloff, María Inés Rodríguez and Katia García-Antón, taking place from October 2026 through March 2027 at Park Abbey’s Museum PARCUM.
Park Abbey’s Museum PARCUM ↗