Dreaming images that do not exist
fabulation, archive, and artificial intelligence
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33871/19805071.2026.34.1.11720Keywords:
Archive, Critical Fabulation, Artificial Intelligence, Black Cinema, Re-existenceAbstract
The article investigates how contemporary audiovisual practices mobilize artificial intelligence not as a mere technical tool, but as a regime of image production capable of reconfiguring the relationships between archive, memory, and fabulation within the context of Black images. Through an analysis of the short film Emi Ofe (2024), by Igi Lola Ayedun, it examines how artificial images, devoid of indexical grounding and detached from an archivable past, displace the status of documentary evidence and challenge the modern paradigm of the image as trace. Grounded in an essayistic-analytical approach, the study articulates critical fabulation, Afrofabulation, and promptography to demonstrate that speculative imagination, far from operating as retrospective repair, constitutes a political gesture of re-existence in the face of the colonial archive’s gaps, affirming presences, bodies, and possible futures in contemporary audiovisual practices.
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