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What is Worth Remembering?
Last year, we launched 'Once Upon A Garden: The Complete Series' by @LindaDouniaR, a project that asks a simple but powerful question: What is worth remembering?
Since 2022, Linda Dounia has been building a speculative archive of endangered and extinct plants, many of which are barely documented. By training an AI software with historical data to imagine the flora of West Africa, her home region, as it might have looked decades ago.
These images are shaped by what little remains: herbarium records from colonial expeditions, family photos, national archives, and scattered notes. As AI models have become more advanced, the visuals have grown more refined, but they still carry the limits of the fragmented data they’re based on.
The project doesn’t try to recreate the past exactly. Instead, it highlights how biodiversity is unevenly remembered. It raises important questions: What do we choose to document? What gets left out? And how does this shape what we know?
'Once Upon A Garden' invites us to reflect on the role of memory, technology, and the stories we pass on especially as we face ongoing ecological loss.
↓Explore each floral group below and its transformation throughout the years of training the AI software.