art

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.

This series proposes the book as a sculptural object and will see Caballero print eight different books, each as an edition of one, with a unique ISBN and the anatomy and structure of a traditional book.

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.

Caballero’s Book Sculptures are stunning objects yet remain very authentically books, with a table of contents, an author page and a dedication, which is hand-signed and dedicated to its collector.

The physical books are accompanied by a video work of a single page endlessly turning while Caballero reads the poem (minted onto the Ethereum blockchain via the artist’s own smart contract), in addition to this inscription of the poem onto the Bitcoin blockchain – repositioning poetry within contemporary systems of display, transaction and record.

The series documents how our file storage mechanisms have evolved: from page, to pixel, to decentralized ledger.

Presentation of Caballero’s work at Madrid’s Rosewood Villa Magna, hosted by Christie’s, 2025

Purposefully bare, the videos present language – and its utterance – as art. Video introduces what the page precludes: the sonic body of the poem, the poet’s voice.

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 an event hosted by Christie’s and then became the centerpiece in Caballero’s solo show at Office Impart in 2025. Unraveling was a finalist for the Digital Art Awards.

Caballero has presented her Book Sculptures at the Venice Biennale Vernissage, Art Basel Miami Beach, Art Genève, and Fundación Telefónica.