I instrumentally "abused" PortraitAI, a free app with paid options, designed to generate images in the style of eighteenth-century European portraiture, by giving it the image of Coatlicue as its starting point (one of the least "European" Mexica sculptures in existence). The process was nested: the first result became the input for obtaining the second; once obtained, it went back in as the primary image to generate the third, and so on, without interrupting the chain, until the app produced a realistic, indisputable oil portrait. I took advantage of the app's ideological load (perhaps unintended, since its own developers publicly apologized for its monocultural bias) so that the Mexica sculpture would end up as the face of an eighteenth-century European woman. The cleft lip was neither generated nor suggested by the app: I added it in the drawings, as the trace of Coatlicue's split head that the app had erased. Thus, a techno-ideological limitation became an aesthetic and ironic discourse.

Is this Coatlicue's revenge against the West, turning its women into leporinas? Or is that split lip a precious gift from Coatlicue? Does Coatlicue, an essential leporina herself, recognize these women as her daughters? They seem like mythic stories worthy of the Odyssey, yet conjured out of nothing.

Like the Post-COVID Series, Leporinas later became a fossil. In 2026, the app changed radically, and its earlier version vanished without a trace: these drawings are now ink casts of what that version produced. I explain this in the note to the Post-COVID Series.