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.
Ana María Caballero delivers a multifaceted rendition of self in the performative poem Waiting Room. Tying into her own strong spoken-word history and poetry’s tradition of orality, Caballero performs her verse on screen, using her own body to speak the language of the poem, exploring how her physicality ties to her verse in this form for the first time. Her text’s narrative twists with the vicissitudes of caretaking.
The intersecting Spanish, translating to “You, Me, Ours”, is a play on words that shifts the speaker’s intent. The formal division in Waiting Room prompts us to question the permeable boundaries between caring for ourselves and caring for others.
Waiting Room is from Caballero’s prize-winning book Mammal.
In transforming her poems into choreographic scores, Caballero further incorporated her physical self into her digital works, already drenched with her voice, representing the visceral reactions that her performances elicit and drawing out how and where language lives in the body.
She also created prints of these poems that resemble an unbound book, incorporating photographic stills from her performance. These prints owe a debt of gratitude to Barbara Brändli’s work in dance photography.
Mammal is the title poem from Caballero’s book MAMMAL, which won the 2022 US National Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize and was a semifinalist for the 2023 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize.
Embodied experience is murky ground, at once the root and lofty branch of consciousness, but if we are to disassemble the narratives that are used against us, we must first dare to name them–without romanticism or preciousness.
This performative work honors Caballero’s explorations of the tension between physicality and selfhood, between biological processes and their cultural implications, and between ecology and the storylines we construct to attempt to contain it.
Photography by Luis Gaspar.
Recorded via motion-capture technology, this new work continues Caballero’s explorations of how physical movement can translate the spoken-word, using body language to unleash the vital, guttural essence of communication.
Though physical failure here is defined by others, namely, a medical face, the vocal delivery and choreographic score question its validity. In Echo Graph, the body transmits the layers of subversion hidden in the work’s written text to create a rich strata of complementary and contradictory meanings, as often happens in everyday exchanges.
Lo justo is Caballero’s first performative poem in Spanish and forms part of her artist book Ropa sucia (The Wash). This choreographic work takes a narrative approach, transmitting her plot-driven poem via gestures.
