Adelaida is an immersion in the traces of memory, a visual exploration that stirs up time to restore the story of a woman who challenged the codes of her class and gender from the margins of her era. On the threshold of modernity, between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, Adelaida Martínez-Corera embodied a silent yet unwavering dissidence: she was a widow with three children who was responsible for another three and took over the management of a building in the Lavapiés neighbourhood, transcending the imposed limitations and affirming herself as an active subject in a society that kept women sequestered in the private sphere.

This reconstruction unfolds in a constant dialogue between the archived and the imagined. The Hausmann photographic archive, made up of carte de visite and cabinet portraits, offers a visual atlas of the nineteenth-century bourgeois world, revealing both how it was straitjacketed and the chinks in that armour. These images are anything but mere vestiges and instead question the historical iconography of femininity and its absences, evoking what time has sought to silence. In turn, images generated via artificial intelligence play a role in this cartography of the unsaid by proposing scenes that were never captured, moments taken from the documentary gaze that now emerge in an exercise of visual restitution. Inspired by historical documents and the pictorial aesthetic of the period, these images expand the boundaries of representation and reformulate the status of memory in the digital age.

The figure of Adelaida becomes even more palpable through original documents that carry the density of time.This proposal is located at the Museo Nacional del Romanticismo, offering a context to the world in which Adelaide was born, witness of a society on its way to modernity.