art
Echo Graph
20.02. – 04.04.2025
at OFFICE IMPART; Waldenserstr. 2-4, 10551 Berlin
Curatorial text by Doreen Ríos
Curatorial text by Doreen Ríos, in German
Curatorial text by Doreen Ríos, in Spanish
At the root of the exhibition is a single poem, Echo Graph, from Caballero’s prize-winning book MAMMAL, which narrates the moment the artist is informed by a doctor that her placenta has stopped working and that her first-born son must be taken out immediately. Following a grim series of events, Caballero ends up on a glacial operating table, where she has an emergency C-section after her child’s heart-rate drops during induced contractions of birth. The doctors then realize that her placenta is fine.
Taking place twelve years later, this exhibition vindicates trauma through its transformation in art. The original poem is not driven by anger but by a desire to document. In “publishing” one poetic text in manifold ways, Caballero becomes an artist, body, writer who has seized control.
Echo Graph, Exhibition view, Office Impart, Berlin 2025
Researcher Doreen Ríos writes of the exhibition in her curatorial text:
“If we had to determine what encompasses the body of a poem, what would that be? Ana María Caballero’s Echo Graph refuses static answers, instead unfolding as a living interrogation of poetry’s boundaries. This exhibition—part requiem, part rebirth—traces a single poem’s journey from the intimacy of trauma to the expansiveness of digital realms. It mutates, fractures, and regenerates across mediums, channeling the largest process of virtualization—the transformation of lived experience to text—by insisting that poetry’s true body thrives in the liminal spaces between language and materiality, memory and medium.”
The Exhibition presents the following works:
Echo Graph
In this multi-faceted rendition of self, Caballero expands her Literal Litoral series of choreographic poems to place her body where it began—the womb. Echo Graph is an exercise in inversion: the poet is defined through her creation, the mother replaces her fetus, the patient subverts her doctor’s verdict.
Echo Graph, 2024
Echo Graph – Prints
A limited series of stills from the micro poetic film Echo Graph will debut in this exhibition. These photographic images were selected to evoke the motion of the video work as well as lean into the narrative elements in the poem. Indeed, different printed timestamps from the choreographic work correspond to the same verse, representing the fluidity of how poetry is generated and perceived in the body.
Echo Graph – Book Sculpture
Caballero’s Book Sculptures question how society values poetry and propose the book as a sculptural object. Echo Graph, the fourth volume from this eight-part series, exists as a single edition and contains one eponymous poem printed 197 times in its pages. When taken as integers, the digits in 197 add up eventually to 8, a number that represents abundance.
As with the other tomes in Caballero’s Book Sculptures, Echo Graph has a unique ISBN and the anatomy and structure of a traditional book.
Echo Graph – Page Break
Shown for the first time in this exhibition, this new conceptual series represents Caballero’s efforts to take poetry beyond the page, while maintaining and conveying her reverence for that beloved object: the book.
“ciclo” – Paperwork
“ciclo” is the third physical sculpture to emerge from Caballero’s performance-based, generative AI Paperwork series, which materializes spoken-word verse via the digital form. Caballero’s work invites poets to devise new ways to share their work with the world, rooting it in paper and pen, but also allowing it to transcend.
From performed verse, to its embodiment via the digital form, to meticulously rendered physicality, this series affirms Caballero’s belief in the permanence and materiality of poetry.
Only six physical sculptures from Caballero’s Paperwork series will be brought to life.
Photography by Luis Gaspar