POISONOUS, NOXIOUS AND SUSPICIOUS

The association between women and "poisonous, harmful and suspicious" plants is marked by narratives of female demonization and prejudices linked to otherness. Inspired by the stories of pioneering female scientists whose legacies were recognized too late, I reimagined their trajectories through fictional portraits created with AI, which merge their images with the plants and aesthetics that defined them, representing them at the age of their deaths. The speculative biographies I created are accessible via the caption of each of the women presented.

Poisonous, Harmful, and Suspicious presents a gallery of speculative portraits of women (Artists-Scientists), chosen for the degree of gender violence they were subjected to in the fields of art and science. All are represented at the age at which they died and in symbiosis with the plants that marked their research and healing practices.

The collection brings together mostly scientist-artists who lived beyond the age of 60—single, widowed, or separated—and who often died alone, without recognition and in precarious conditions. The series also includes women who were denounced to the Inquisition and stigmatized as witches, the first female doctors in history.

Created using natural language models, the portraits highlight, in the difficulties of their processing, the biases of artificial intelligence, which reinforces socially ingrained prejudices. The resistance of machines to generate their images seems to reiterate the hypothesis that the patriarchy that silenced them in life remains inscribed in algorithms and data colonialism.