art
Book Sculptures
Book Sculptures
Caballero’s Book Sculptures are an eight-part series that interrogates the economic, archival and technological structures through which language acquires value.
Each book is created as an edition of one, inverting the value to scarcity ratio of the book and proposing it as a sculptural object.
Language is among humanity’s earliest storage technologies — a tool designed to outlast the limits of the body. The book stabilized this function, while digital media transformed language into endlessly reproducible data and video restored the sonic presence long suppressed by print. Contemporary blockchain infrastructures now propose new forms of permanence.
As memory increasingly migrates toward immaterial networks, the question of how language endures becomes newly urgent.
Book Sculptures address this question, positioning poetry within a continuum of record-keeping systems that extends from the codex to the moving image to cryptographic inscription. In doing so, the series traces this lineage.
Developed with a bespoke book binder, the works in this series are objects that remain structurally faithful to the tradicional book codex: with a table of contents, a unique ISBN, an author page and a dedication, which is hand-signed and dedicated to its collector.
The books in this series contain only one poem, printed 197 times in their pages. When taken as integers, the digits in 197 add up eventually to 8, a number that represents abundance.
The Wish, the first Book Sculpture, is from Caballero’s prize-winning book Mammal and was originally published by the South Dakota Review. It was exhibited at the Lumen Prize-shortlisted exhibition Poème SBJKT at Librairie Métamorphoses in Paris in 2023.
Milk received the Academy of American Poets Christopher R. Kelly Award and debuted at Phillips Auction House during London Frieze Week. It was also presented at Art Basel Miami in 2024 and during Art Genève in 2025.
Echo Graph debuted at Madrid’s Rosewood Villa Magna, at an event hosted by Christie’s and then was a centerpiece in Caballero’s solo show at Office Impart in February 2025.
Book Sculptures are accompanied by a video work of a single page of the book endlessly turning while Caballero reads the poem as well as a Bitcoin inscription of its verse, accentuating the artist’s expansion of the ways poetry can be experienced, exhibited, recorded and transacted in the digital age.
The Wish, presented at Librairie Métamorphoses, Paris, 2023
The Wish, MP4, 2023
Another Airport Poem, presented at a private collector event during ARCO, Madrid, 2024
Another Airport Poem, MP4, 2024
Milk, Presented at Phillips Auction House during Frieze, London, 2024
Milk, MP4, 2024
Echo Graph, Presented at Rosewood Hotel by Christie’s, Madrid, 2025
Echo Graph, MP4, 2025
