Speech Patterns marks the next chapter in Caballero’s investigation of voice, form and translation, evolving her explorations of performance-driven materiality. Radical Repair is the very first work from this new series, presented by bitforms gallery at Untitled Miami. Radical Repair uses digital and artisanal tooling to visualize a performative presentation given by the artist during Berlin Art Week.
In 2023, Caballero partnered with Spain’s 120-year-old Diario ABC to release a series of digital poems that honored her poetic practice and the newspaper’s centuries-long history of supporting avante-garde artists through its fabled weekly magazine BYN, transformed into a vehicle via which to celebrate the innovative spirit of web3.
Being Borges, presented by Office Impart, proposes a new form of literary translation, begging the question: What’s at stake when language becomes literal via the visual?
In this 12-part series, Ana María Caballero takes Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero’s The Book of Imaginary Beings (a vast compendium of humanity’s imagined creatures) and its 1970 English translation by Norman Thomas di Giovanni as points of departure from which to explore how AI interprets Spanish versus English text, unmasking biases ingrained in large data sets.
Throughout 2023, Caballero performed her poetry in numerous venues across the world, inviting audience members to write down one-word responses to her verse on sheets of paper. The words they inscribed represent the multivalent emotional reactions that poetry elicits. One audience member left an origami swan. She gathered these slips of paper—these distilled, private moments of connection to performed poetry—and used each word to actuate Paperwork’s compositions, connecting the personal to the universal via the database of our collective unconscious that is AI.
In Oración (Prayer), which takes its name from a poem by acclaimed Colombian poet María Mercedes Carranza, Ana María Caballero proposes a new form of literary translation, breaking down the process to probe the subliminal connotations of prayer, the poetics of prompts and the semiotic entanglements of metaphor.
