Money Make The World

Money Make the World is a work of paintings that brings together the object archive, artificial intelligence, digital creation tools, and human manual creation. The work created the visual missing documentation of the Dutch presence in the Kongo Kingdom between 1641 and 1648.

The paintings were designed with missing documentation of this event. Based on archival photos of objects from the Wereld Museum, Rijksmuseum, Metropolitan Museum in New York, and Sankuru Museum in DR Congo, I used artificial intelligence to obtain the first models of the missing visual images. Subsequently, I used collage techniques to guide the scenarios, then involved the painters of Dafen Village in China, renowned for reproducing 17th-century paintings.

The result is a new identity that navigates between the existing visible elements of paintings from the golden age of Dutch painting, the errors of technology, and the appropriation of the works of painters who are confused between exact reproduction, the improvement of technological errors, and their own know-how as artists.