Pace
In her most recent micro poetic film, Ana María Caballero pays homage to Pipilotti Rist’s Ever Is Over All and proposes an evolution in personal empowerment. Whereas Rist’s protagonist symbolically takes down failed systems, Caballero’s main character practices radical repair.
Pace posits that private joy is as powerful a form of resistance as destruction.
Pace, first part of the multichannel installation, created through a live studio performance and cinematic AI. Custom AI-generated soundtrack, 2025.
Caballero stars in her own work, performing gleeful movements rooted in Latin American salsa music, which she grew up dancing and accesses as a source of resilience. As she advances, urban wreckage repairs.
The making of Pace at Mad Arts Museum in South Florida, 2025
The making of Pace at Mad Arts Museum in South Florida, 2025
By contrast, in Rist’s work, a woman smashes car windows with a flower as she walks down a street, an exuberant smile on her face, similar to the smile she’s given by a passing policewoman, who presumably approves of the destruction.
The works are connected through the protagonists’ outward and exaggerated expressions of self-possessed joy and their public (and thus out-of-place) physicality. Both works are also linked through the protagonists’ red shoes, signaling confidence in the trodden path.
Pace, Installation view, Berlin Art Week, Office Impart, 2025
This is the first work from Caballero’s ongoing Literal Litoral series of performative explorations that combines her live, performed poetry with cinematic AI.
In Pace, Madrid’s Calle del Barquillo is recreated through AI because a pharmacy that bears her father’s name, F. Caballero, exists there in actuality. Caballero pilgrimed here daily as she mourned her father’s death, finding solace in its presence.
Stills from Pace’s cinematic AI video work, 2025.
The second part of this multichannel installation consists of coded visuals, the result of a custom algorithm that reads Caballero’s body-in-motion and translates it into graphic marks, probing the connection between embodied experience and our attempts to record it.
We often consider that to encounter nature, we need to go somewhere to do so. But our bodies themselves are nature. Rist’s video pairs gleeful destruction with scenes of out-of-focus flowering scenes. In contrast, Caballero pairs radical repair with the body-as-sign, proposing closer relationships with ourselves as a first approach to systemic transformation.
Pace, second part of the multichannel video work, custom-coded algorithmic reading of Caballero’s body-in-motion, 2025.
A series of still, generative images accompany the multi-channel video work and are designed to emulate an unbound folded book.
Pace’s generative component draws on a visual language the poet developed by transforming her poetry into handmade marks via performative drawing.
Pace includes two coded parts: a video and an image. The curved lines within both represent multi-layered translations – from written language into movement and from movement into coded record. The resulting etchings speak an evocative, guttural language, a poetic mark-making that transmits the immediacy and urgency of performance.
Pace’s generative component draws on Caballero’s performative drawing. 2025.
Pace’s generative component draws on Caballero’s performative drawing. 2025.
Scattered stamps of Caballero’s body-in-motion, extracted from the choreographic work with AI, contextualize this mark-making as they dance between fragments of verse.
Here, written words, performed verse and digital scripting speak a living, breathing and algorithmic language – a radically contemporary imprint of poetry-in-motion, digital yet organic, automatic yet bespoke.
Pace, generative stills representing a generative reading of the poem, gestural marks of the poet’s choreography and fragments of verse, 2025.
Pace is from Caballero’s seventh book, Material, a recipient of Trio House Press’ Editors’ Selection in Poetry and forthcoming in 2026.
Concept, poem, choreography, performance: Ana María Caballero
Directed: Jayme Kaye Gershen
Produced: Mad Arts
Custom algorithm: Cameron Nelson
