Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert

The Archive of Unnamed Workers/ Shadows (2022)

A collaboration project with Alexia Achilleos

The Archive of Unnamed Workers attempts to negotiate the absences in archaeology-related photographic archives by creating numerous, fictional, portraits of Cypriot workers using Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) machine learning technology. Photographic archives by the Swedish Cyprus Expedition, John Linton Myres, and Luigi Palma di Cesnola, became the source material for these new, machine-made, portraits of Cypriot workers at archaeological sites. The final images are completely artificially created, and do not resemble any real workers. Instead, they pay tribute to the countless and unphotographed workers who contributed to Cypriot archaeology but who remain unnamed and unacknowledged. The artificial intelligence-generated portraits were subsequently transferred to 35mm glass photographic slides (reversal film), a technology widely used in the mid-20th century, which is almost obsolete today.

EXHIBITION VIEWS

Exhibition Views: State Gallery of Contemporary Art - SPEL, Nicosia, Cyprus. Exhibition: “In the Sea of the Setting Sun”, Curated by Elena Stylianou, Nov. 2022 - Feb 2023.

The paintings are from the series “Shadows” (Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert, 2025) that accompanied the work.

Exhibition views from the “The World through AI” at Jeu de Paume in Paris, France (11 April - 21 September 2025). Curated by: Antonio Somaini & Ada Ackerman. Photographer for first two images: Antoine Quittet.

https://jeudepaume.org/en/evenement/the-world-through-ai/

Note: This artwork was partially inspired by the “De-Colonizing Archaeology-Related Photographic Archives” project which has received a generous grant from the Hellenic Observatory of the London School of Economics and the A.G. Leventis Foundation. See more info here: https://www.lse.ac.uk/Hellenic-Observatory/Research/Cyprus-Projects-2021-2022/De-colonizing-Archaeology-related-photographic-archives