In LOVE YOUR NAILS!, the archive is not preserved, but re-organised from the outset. Historical material is rearranged, perspectives are shifted, and socially attributed roles of women and men are deliberately reversed. In this way, the film reveals that the archive is not a neutral repository, but reproduces existing visual orders and power relations.
Between archive, fiction and poetic narrative, a cinematic space emerges in which gaps in historiography become visible and marginalised voices gain a new presence. Experimental AI functions as a central tool, not for reproducing reality, but for generating a precise, non-real visualisation. These images do not replace anything documented, but rather make visible what has never been recorded: the culturally conceived, the imaginable.
As Alexander Kluge puts it: ‘Film reveals material reality, the given. The AI image reveals the collective image, the imaginary. It does not show how the world is, but how our cultural data conceives it.’
Narges Kalhor
