“Tracing Angel’s Men” is an art and research project that takes as a starting point John Lawrence Angel’s anthropometric photographic archive of 80 plus Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot men created in 1949 in Episkopi, Cyprus and now kept at the National Anthropological Archives of the Smithsonian Institution in the United States.

The artwork raises a series of critical questions: How can a historically problematic anthropometric archive be re-used, re-framed, decolonised, or expanded so that it gains relevance today? What roles do measurement, photography, and storytelling play in shaping our understanding of people from the past? Which kinds of data are considered valuable, by whom, and why? And finally, what remains absent; what was never photographed or recorded during the making of the original anthropometric archive? Can I speculate on the photographic process using AI technologies?