The gentle hush of breakers meets the low hum of processors at Montevideo’s Museum of Migrations, where Uruguayan photographer Federico Ruiz Santaesteban and his AI collaborator use seawater, sand, and code to coax long-forgotten immigrant faces back into the light.
Echoes Carried on Salt Air
Step into “Desembarco,” and the first thing you feel is a slight sting of salt on the tongue—an olfactory detail Ruiz insisted on. Pumps tucked behind the gallery walls mist diluted seawater into the air, wrapping visitors in the same scent that greeted their ancestors’ ships more than a century ago. On linen-covered panels hang luminous black-and-white portraits: an Italian seamstress in a lace collar, a Basque fisherman with wind-scored cheeks, a West African matriarch balancing dignity and fatigue.
Most began as thumb-sized photographs, their emulsion blistered by tropical humidity. Ruiz fed each fragment into an AI engine trained on period studio portraits, the machine filling cracks the sea had eaten. “I’m not chasing forensic precision,” he told EFE. “I’m offering families a doorway.” Academic studies from the Universidad de la República back his intuition; memory scholars note that a believable silhouette, even if partly imagined, can revive long-lost family narratives. In Uruguay—where, according to census data, two-thirds of citizens trace roots to trans-Atlantic arrivals—those narratives are the country’s quiet scaffolding.
When Fiction Heals the Archive
One portrait shows a teenage girl with a braid so glossy that it seems wet. The only surviving photo of her ancestor was a blurred passport stamp, yet her grandson gasped when he saw the AI rendering. “That’s the family nose,” he whispered. Although the algorithm had invented much of her face, it landed on a truth deeper than pixels. Ruiz calls this “emotional accuracy”—the point where data ends, and the story takes over.
In Estudios de Identidad, anthropologist Silvia Brum argues that immigrant descendants often stitch their history from rumor, half-legible letters, and a single keepsake. The gap between facts becomes fertile ground for collective imagination. Ruiz embraces that tension. He prints every AI negative onto silver-gelatin paper, then bathes it in seawater enriched with sand sieved from Montevideo’s Rambla beach. Minerals bite into the emulsion, raising freckles that mimic corrosion. “The sea helped erase these images,” he says. “Now it helps rewrite them.”
Code, Carbon, and the Cost of Memory
AI’s cultural boom carries an ecological bill: massive data centers gulp electricity and evaporate reservoirs. Ruiz’s response feels almost talismanic. His workstation runs on a repurposed laptop barely powerful enough for video calls; he rents servers by the hour for heavy processing, then shuts them down. “I treat computing time like darkroom chemicals—use only what the print deserves,” he explains.
Environmental journalist Lucía Sosa notes in La Diaria that Uruguay’s grid, already 95 percent renewable, softens the carbon footprint, but seawater development adds another layer of restraint. The brine he collects is heated by sunlight in shallow trays behind the museum; no synthetic fixers touch the drain. Art meets sustainability in a loop as resourceful as the migrants it honors. Visitors peer through the glass at the trays, watching slow crystals form—time itself turning liquid into memory.
EFE
Where Ancestry Meets the Algorithm
Museum director Luis Bergatta sees “Desembarco” as a classroom without desks. School groups cluster around a portrait of a Galician carpenter; the guide invites them to imagine the creak of his workshop in 1910. One child asks if the image is “real.” The reply comes gently: “Real enough to remember him by.” That distinction matters in a world awash with flawless deepfakes. Ruiz’s prints wear their imperfections proudly—grainy edges, salt scars—a visual reminder that all history is partly conjecture, yet still vital.
Families leave carrying miniature cyanotypes of their chosen portraits; each stamped Mar y Código – Museo de las Migraciones. Some tuck them into wallets next to modern IDs. Others promise to mail copies to cousins abroad, letting the faces migrate again. Over coffee in the museum café, a woman named Elena Ferreira wipes a tear. “My grandmother always said her mother had serious eyes. Now I’ve seen them.”
Diaspora scholars frequently invoke the ocean as a metaphor: a body that divides yet connects. In “Desembarco,” seawater is the literal, digital code of the vessel and memory of the cargo that finally lands. The tension between accuracy and affection remains unresolved—maybe that’s the point. What matters is the reunion, however spectral, of present and past.
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Credits: Reporting: EFE Montevideo bureau. Academic context: Universidad de la República; Estudios de Identidad; Uruguayan Ministry of Energy. Additional journalism: L. Sosa, La Diaria. Photography and concept: Federico Ruiz Santaesteban.