Fifty Ways of Looking at a Poem, 2024
Fifty Ways of Looking at a Poem is an analog generative system, one that celebrates the ways writers and readers construct each other. In this performative series, Caballero invited different people to read and annotate the same poem, performing their experience of its verse via hand-written marginalia. The collection’s name is rooted in Wallace Stevens seminal work of modernist literature “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”
Fifty Ways of Looking at a Poem, Installation view, Madrid, 2024
Caballero filmed a durational performance in which she hung each poem from two parallel clothing lines on a rooftop in Madrid. The clothing line is a throughline of her practice; it represents accessing the transcendental through the mundane.
She then performed the poem in front of the clothing lines. The durational performance consists of three videos: the two videos of her hanging the poems from the two clothing lines plus the video of this reading.
Fifty Ways of Looking at a Poem: Durational performance, Installation view, LOAD Gallery, Fine Print Exhibition, Barcelona, 2024
Caballero digitized the annotated poems and offered them as a collaborative, digital-only collection. She preserved the original 50 physical poems to exhibit as a single organism.
The Francisco Carolinum Museum acquired the final five digital editions. Each of these final five editions included an un-annotated physical print: an invitation to a new reader to annotate the poem and become part of the project.
Installation view, Menorca, Spain, 2024
The 50 original, physical poems will be exhibited at the Francisco Carolinum during Ars Electronica 2026, together with the five new hand-annotated poems. The combined, iterative interventions in this series represent the collective evolution of readership. Language is universal—yet personal. Every reading pulls and pushes it forth.
