Requiem Diurnus — Hypergraphia

The work

A memorial that ran daily

For six months in 2024, an automated system searched the news of some twenty-five countries, in their own languages, for reports of femicide.

Each verified-relevant report became a work: fifteen objects drawn from the article; a symbolic image built from those objects; a poem composed in the language of the report; and a link back to the source. About a hundred cases a day. The daily system has since become an archive. It is released under a Creative Commons license.

~25 countries · ~100 cases a day · 11,000+ images and poems in six months · poems in the language of each report

The project publishes its own process — the search, the collection, the automated reading that pulls each case's objects, the image and the poem — and each work carries its metadata and a link to the report it came from.

Relevance was assessed automatically; the project does not claim every report was independently verified.

One work, held

One of eleven thousand

Not a gallery — one work, held still. A single case from the archive, as the machine composed it.

A memorial poster from Requiem Diurnus: a face composed entirely of symbolic objects — kitchen utensils, lace, a knife, a phone, keys, the Brazilian flag — beside a poem in Portuguese. A single case from Guiratinga, Brazil, June 2024.

Its images are symbolic compositions, never portraits of victims. Here a face is built from the objects of a life — utensils and lace, a knife, a phone, keys, a flag — and a poem is written beside it, in the language of the report.

Guiratinga, Mato Grosso, Brazil · 18 June 2024 · from a report by Agora MT

One work, complete — the sculpture, its objects, its poem, its date. The archive holds more than eleven thousand.

The scale

A hundred a day

A requiem is sung once. This one ran daily, because the violence is daily — one day's news alone could carry two hundred reports. The archive holds the six months as a red histogram, a waveform of days, and the works are reached through it.

The Requiem Diurnus archive interface: a red histogram resembling an audio waveform on black, each bar a day of the six-month record, titled Requiem Diurnus.

The archive's own interface — six months of days; the red bars are the count.

The prologue

After Kahlo

Brenda Romero's prologue to the work opens with Frida Kahlo's Unos cuantos piquetitos (1935) — painted after a newspaper minimized a murder — and places Requiem Diurnus in that lineage: art answering journalistic language that minimizes violence against women. The prologue reads the work as a global memorial and a refusal of sensationalism, its passage from news to image and poem a kind of intersemiotic translation. Read the prologue →

In the scholarly record

How it has been read

Claudia Kozak — a conference paper at Roma Tre (2024) and a later journal article read the work as a test of whether Latin American digital art can turn the dominant AI systems against themselves: a decolonial archive built with the very platforms of data colonialism, working with and against its tools. Kozak also names its limit — the image model keeps reproducing stylized, narrow-waisted female forms; the bias survives the intervention.

Maria Elisa Rodrigues Moreira — a peer-reviewed article devoted to the work, "O requiem diurnus de Diego Bonilla: morte e materialidade em conjunção" (Texto Digital, 2025; online January 2026), reads it through Vilém Flusser's technical images and the materiality of objects generated from language. Moreira argues that the project reasserts the victims' subjectivity — her interpretation, offered as a reading, not a measured outcome.

Exhibited — the central work of the Sacramento State Library exhibition Femicides: Shattering the Silence of Violence Against Women, within Chicanx/Latinx Excellence at Sac State and Beyond, curated by Bonilla with Brenda Romero and Maria Vargas.

The archive

What remains

The daily run has ended; the archive remains, every work linked to the report it remembers.

Enter the archive →

Also: how it was made · Brenda Romero's prologue.

Credits

Diego Bonilla — concept, programming, direction.
Brenda Romero — prologue.

Exhibited at the Sacramento State Library, co-curated with Brenda Romero and Maria Vargas.