Fictional archives and generative memory: AI as counter-narrative device in evi stamou's who was here? (2025)

Abstract

This article examines Evi Stamou's Who Was Here? (2025) as a documentary that uses generative artificial intelligence to work with a fragile family archive and an inaccessible historical past. The film combines family photographs, oral memory, written prompts, ChatGPT responses, and AI-generated images to approach the silence surrounding the director's father and his recruitment during the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974. Rather than treating generated images only through the risk of falsification, the article argues that Who Was Here? shifts attention toward custody: who can sustain a story when the archive is incomplete, politically muted, or difficult to transmit? Through an analysis of the interaction between the director and artificial intelligence, the generated reconstructions, and the distortions of the images, the article shows how Stamou turns generative tools into a counter-narrative device. The director preserves errors and introduces corrections in order to mark the distance between the plausibility produced by the models and the situated knowledge of the events transmitted to her. The article proposes the term algorithmic mourning to describe this incomplete attempt to keep present what has been lost by working with its remains through generative forms. Ultimately, Who Was Here? suggests that machines can assist remembrance, but cannot assume memory as responsibility.