Cache of a Deleted Girl

“Cache of a Deleted Girl” traces what happens to a female identity after exorcism. Through poem, AI-generated imagery, cloned voice, and composite bodies, it reframes haunting not as possession, but as hosting — a temporary, careful act of carrying another within oneself, where identity persists, circulates, and is collectively held in feminist care.

The work begins with a fragment: a piece of red fabric recognized as part of Roberta Breitmore’s attire, the persona Lynn Hershman Leeson once embodied and later exorcised. This encounter opens a speculative space — where does her spirit persist once released? The work follows this question through a poem, in which female bodies hold traces of others without fixing or resolving them.

The poem functions as both script and structure. Its lines become prompts generating AI images, combining self-portraits with archival references and synthetic body fragments. Figures emerge as composites rather than individuals. A cloned voice speaks the text, suggesting presence without a fixed body. Across poem, image, and voice, the work builds a system in which bodies are assembled, shared, and temporarily inhabited.

“Cache of a Deleted Girl” understands feminism as a genealogy without bloodline, as a form of mediated inheritance in which exorcised female souls are received and held by a collective of women. Every woman who speaks carries an echo and cares for it temporarily. Haunting is reinterpreted as an act of feminist solidarity — a form of resistance that takes shape through shared presence, sustained by practices of care and a shared female strength.