collaborations
The Body Prepares
The Body Prepares combines Nancy Baker Cahill’s acclaimed Slipstream series with a poem from Ana María Caballero’s prize-winning manuscript Mammal. This work fuses both artists’ interest in the tension between physicality and selfhood, between biological processes and their cultural implications, and between ecology and the storylines we construct to explain (and thus attempt to contain) it. Societal engines have appropriated the facts of our physical selves, often with a limiting view.
Poems in the Public Domain
Poems in the Public Domain [PITPD] represents a new form of poetic anthology—one that celebrates the role of the reader in shaping the life of a poem. In this unique art piece, 14 readers take turns discovering 30 classic poems. We invite collectors to explore this compendium, selected to present a diverse, engaging archive that acknowledges the importance of certain seminal works in shaping our collective unconscious.
I Wish for the Metaverse to Rinse off of Me
I Wish for the Metaverse to Rinse off of Me is a collection about both the power and the infirmity of affirmations. Shamanic, mantra-like, willful, affirmations seek to map a desired direction. That is, until time and mind get in the way. Within brief, passing moments, our minds are able to manifest conflicting wishes—and do so via declarative, convincing statements.
City Life
From theVERSEverse’s GenText series, City Life, is a collaboration between poet Ana Maria Caballero + artist Ivona Tau, with generative text from a poem co-created with AI writing tool Sudowrite.
Caballero sketched a rough draft of the twelve stanzas of City Life during the funeral of a close friend’s father. She sent Tau these notes, which Tau took as inspiration to create the poignant, urban visuals for the piece. Using AI as poetic conspirator, Caballero crafted the final version of the poem.
Domingo 2
Domingo 2, co-created by Julián Brangold and Ana María Caballero, sets the ache of longing against the stark background of concrete citylife. This work summons a vast spectrum of emotions–from apocalyptic nostalgia to the alienation derived from a life dominated by technology and its social networks.
room
room is a spoken-word video poem written by Ana Maria Caballero with original visuals by Joëlle. The piece was created using a waveform of Ana’s voice reciting the poem, then processing it and adding fx that hint at floor plans and room-shaped forms. Interconnected boxes appear and disappear, coming and going like memories, leaving traces of an almost pre-verbal language in their wake.
The Public
The Public is a spoken-word video poem written by Ana Maria Caballero with original visuals by Joëlle. The piece was created using a waveform of Ana’s voice reciting the poem. Inspired by ritual and the circularity of life, the visuals pulse out like words, creating a primordial, pre-verbal setting with their wakes.
Debuted at Core Music Festival in Belgium. May 2022.
Casualty
Body language and text become inseparable in Casualty, a work that explores the subtle layers of communication between couples in longterm committed relationships.
Poem from Caballero’s collection Reverse Commute, published by Silver Birch Press.
Miss Metaverse
Web3 offers artists the possibility of establishing a collector base, independent of traditional art market systems, to potentially become self-sustaining artists. Ironically, the promise of independence requires the construction of a digital persona that grows dissociated from the very substance of self, which is essentially immeasurable.
Items I Scour the Internet to Find
Edition of 1, 2021
Exhibited and sold at live auction at Duran Subastas in Madrid, January 2022.
Items I Scour the Internet to Find is a spoken-word, media rich poem by Ana Maria Caballero, with original artwork by CS Lim. This poem explores our complex relationship with virtual and digital realms, where we seek out, and often find, connections with more ease than in the world of flesh and bone.
Mujeres
Mujeres is a spoken-word, media-rich video poem by Ana Maria Caballero, with original artwork by Cuban artist Octavio Irving. A deeply intimate piece, this poem explores Caballero’s personal history to question the unequal burdens placed on the women of her family.
