Conjuring within a "Museum in Suspension": Critical Fabulation, Spectral Technology, and Digital Insurgency

Abstract

This article analyzes Conjurados (2025) by Marlus Araújo, a work of generative video art, developed for Museu em Suspensão, a project conceived for the Museu da Inconfidência that explores the potential of AI for digital actions in historical museums. The work stages a poetic fabulation on the implosion of the institution’s colonial monumentality and the symbolic rebirths that emerge from ruins. Far from operating as a mere digital animation of the collection, the video mobilizes metaphors of collapse, recomposition, and emergence to question the museum as a device for the fixation of history. Articulating decolonial thought and critiques of digital colonialism, one argue that Conjurados employs artificial intelligence as a speculative technopoetics, exploring algorithmic hallucination as an aesthetic method capable of destabilizing archives. Conjurados operates as a counter-archive that reinscribes memory, tensions the colonial imaginary, and conjures decolonial futures through the entanglement of art, technology, and spectral agency.