Waiting Room: The Mural
Caballero has long considered how to translate her choreographic work into physical forms in a way that preserved the urgency and immediacy of live performance while embodying her interest in analog generativity—the idea that each reading constitutes its own universe, and that readers and writers co-create meaning through an endlessly procreative exchange.
The solution emerged unexpectedly when she encountered an unfinished concertina book by photographer Bárbara Brändl at CentroCentro Madrid. The object—a folded pamphlet documenting dancers in motion—resonated not primarily through its images, but through its material logic.
Designed to be experienced in segments, its fully extended form rendered the content fragmentary, subtly disorienting, even momentarily incorrect—the magic of inversion—yet paradoxically complete.
Fragmentation has long been central to Caballero’s practice. Her work privileges the fragment as a generative unit, capable of igniting new narratives within the reader’s mind while remaining in dialogue with a larger, preexisting whole.
This encounter prompted Caballero to imagine her choreographic poems as undone folded books: dispersed stills from performance interwoven with fragments of verse. She introduced topographical elements to suggest the body as map—a landscape in which poetic meaning is constructed through embodied experience and transmitted as language.
Caballero soaked her hands and forearms in acrylic and chalk paint, seeking to generate different textures on the print with her movements. She then performed the choreographic score while standing in close proximity to the hung print, allowing motion to dictate her body’s interventions.
The prints wields topographical elements that bring the mapping of territories (meaning, the body, words) to bear, while the resulting etchings evoke a guttural language, a poetic mark-making that conveys the immediacy and urgency of performance – that pressing need to express and connect in the physical plane.
