Pace
In her micro-poetic film Pace, Ana María Caballero enters into dialogue with Pipilotti Rist’s Ever Is Over All and proposes an evolution in personal empowerment. Whereas Rist’s protagonist symbolically dismantles failed systems through gleeful destruction, Caballero’s main character practices radical repair.
Pace posits that private joy—rooted in embodiment, memory and ritual—is as powerful a form of resistance as rupture.
Pace is from Caballero’s ongoing Literal Littoral series, a body of performative explorations that explores the connection between body language and spoken language. Across this series, she treats poetry not as static text but as a living, generative force that migrates across imagination, movement, image and code.
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 exuberant, looping movements grounded in Latin American salsa music, which she grew up dancing and continues to access as a source of resilience. As she advances through the urban landscape, wreckage repairs.
Her choreography does not conquer space but tends to it, proposing care and intimacy as transformative forces. Joy here is not ornamental but infrastructural: a technology of survival.
The making of Pace at Mad Arts Museum in South Florida, 2025
Pace, Performative presentation during Berlin Art Week, 2025.
By contrast, in Rist’s Ever Is Over All, a woman walks down a city street smashing car windows with a flower, her exuberant smile echoed and sanctioned by a passing policewoman. Rist pairs gleeful destruction with blurred, flowering landscapes.
Caballero instead pairs radical repair with the body-as-sign, proposing that systemic transformation begins not with spectacle but with intimacy—with how we inhabit ourselves.
The two works are linked through their protagonists’ exaggerated physicality, self-possessed joy and public, out-of-place movement. Both protagonists wear red shoes, signaling confidence in the path being trodden. Where Rist stages rupture, Caballero stages continuity.
Pace, Installation view, Berlin Art Week, Office Impart, 2025
In Pace, Madrid’s Calle del Barquillo is reconstructed through cinematic AI. The street once housed pharmacy that bears Caballero’s father’s name, F. Caballero—a place she pilgrimed to daily while mourning his death, before it fell prey to gentrification.
Through this ritual of return, the street became a site of solace, remembrance and healing. Rather than reproduce the street with documentary fidelity, Caballero reimagines it as a memory-scape shaped by repetition and personal narrative. The resulting environment exists between the real, the remembered and the imagined.
The soundtrack, generated through AI-based compositional tools, draws on music she danced to throughout her childhood. It mirrors the emotional cadence of the choreography and the handwritten poem at the core of the work.
Stills from Pace’s cinematic AI video work, 2025.
The first channel of Pace consists of a live studio performance transformed into a cinematic AI environment. This animated memory-scape externalizes Caballero’s lived experience of grief.
The second channel consists of generative visuals produced by a custom motion-translation algorithm that reads Caballero’s body-in-motion and translates it into graphic marks. One moving image generates the other, establishing an internal network of interactivity in which embodied gesture becomes visual inscription. Moments of stasis in the choreography are likewise metabolized by the system and registered as visual stillness, honoring pause, absence and quiet presence as meaningful states rather than gaps in activity.
Together, these channels form a care-based animation system in which choreography, memory and presence function as legitimate inputs into computational processes.
Pace, second part of the multichannel video work, custom-coded algorithmic reading of Caballero’s body-in-motion, 2025.
A series of generative still images accompanies the multichannel video work. Designed to resemble an unbound, folded book, these compositions reflect Caballero’s theory of analog generativity: the idea that readers and writers construct each other, and that meaning is always co-produced through acts of attention, imagination, and embodiment.
These stills draw on a visual language Caballero developed in earlier works, where she transformed verse into handmade marks by applying chalk and acrylic paint to her body while performing choreographic poems. In Pace, fragments of handwritten verse and scattered moments of choreography drift across the page, contextualizing mark-making as a form of visual writing.
The resulting etchings speak in a guttural, poetic language—an inscription that transmits the immediacy and urgency of performance. 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. Each still reflects the infinite possibilities of readership and interpretation, functioning as a living archive of embodied response.
Pace’s generative component draws on Caballero’s performative drawing. 2025.
Pace, generative stills representing a generative reading of the poem, gestural marks of the poet’s choreography and fragments of verse, 2025.
The poem Pace is drawn from Caballero’s forthcoming poetry collection Material, recipient of Trio House Press’ Editors’ Selection in Poetry and scheduled for publication in 2026. Written entirely by hand, the poem serves as the conceptual and emotional anchor of the work. Through this project, poetry migrates from page to imagination to body to animated image, reimagining the book as a generative, time-based form.
Pace positions artificial intelligence as a co-compositional infrastructure—one capable of storing and transmitting memory, intimacy, joy and vulnerability. It resists extractive and efficiency-driven models of AI, instead foregrounding corporeality, voice and care as legitimate inputs into technological systems.
In doing so, Pace proposes an alternative ethics of animation and computation: one in which stillness is data, joy is resistance, and repair is a form of authorship.
In Pace, 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.
During 2026, Pace will be exhibited at MAD Arts Museum in Fort Lauderdale in a large-scale immersive exhibition that also highlights how the project was created.
Pace, Installation shots at MAD Arts Museum in Fort Lauderdale, 2026.
Credits:
Concept, poem, choreography, performance
Ana María Caballero
Direction
Jayme Kaye Gershen
Production
MAD Arts Museum
Custom motion-translation algorithm
Cameron Nelson
