Ana Maria Caballero - Ana Maria Caballero

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Ana María Caballero is an award-winning, multidisciplinary literary artist. Her work explores how biology delimits societal and cultural rites, ripping the veil from romanticized motherhood and questioning notions that package sacrifice as a virtue. She’s the recipient of the Beverly International Prize, Colombia’s José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize, the Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize, a Future Art Writers Award and a Sevens Foundation Grant. In 2024, she became the first living poet to sell a poem at Sotheby’s. Recognized as a digital poetry pioneer, her work has been nominated for a MAXXI BVLGARI Prize in the Digital Sector, shortlisted for a Lumen Prize, been a finalist for both the Vassar Miller and Academy of American Poetry Prizes and exhibited in museums, galleries and public spaces worldwide.

Waiting Room, 2024

Combining performance, spoken-word poetry, choreography, photography, and blockchain provenance, Waiting Room transcends the page, pushing the boundary of how poetry can be exhibited, experienced and transacted in the digital age.

This performative work honors Caballero’s strong spoken-word history and poetry’s tradition of orality. In this multifaceted rendition of self, she speaks her poem via movement, exploring how body language ties into spoken language.

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.

Presented at Art Dubai 2024 by Gazelli Art House.

Paperwork

Paperwork, released in partnership with Bright Moments, is a performance-based, long-form generative AI collection of digital paper sculptures carved from individual emotional responses to the spoken-word poetry of Ana María Caballero. Throughout 2023, Caballero performed her poems in numerous venues across the world, inviting audience members to write down one word in response to her verse on sheets of paper. She gathered these slips of paper—these distilled, private moments of connection to her readings—and used each word to actuate Paperwork’s compositions, honoring paper’s haptic eloquence and materializing lived experiences via the digital form.

Being Borges

Being Borges is a poetic and (post)photographic recasting of Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero’s Book of Imaginary Beings. Presented in partnership with Berlin gallery Office Impart and London-based Verse Works, this ongoing series begs the question: what is at stake when language becomes literal via the visual?

artifacts

In September 2023, Ana María Caballero and Alex Estorick launched artifacts, a long-form generative AI project. This collection imagines a new token economy where both image and coinage can challenge tired histories.

Ways To Misspell Obsidian

WAYS TO MISSPELL OBSIDIAN is a collection of spoken-word poems by Ana María Caballero that investigates and celebrates the storytelling potential of long-form poetry. Following the passing of a very close friend, Caballero composed JUAN, a eulogy-in-verse. This text serves as both precursor and companion to “Ways to Misspell Obsidian,” a lyric essay written years later in which details of Juan’s passing are braided into the story of the intoxication of Caballero’s young son with nail polish remover.

Juan

Edition 1/1

Once

Edition 1/1

Fathomless

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THE WISH

The Wish is a book that contains one single poem titled, “The Wish,” printed 197 times in its pages. When taken as integers, the digits in 197 add up eventually to 8, a number that represents abundance. This poem is from Caballero’s prize-winning manuscript Mammal and was originally published by the South Dakota Review. Only one edition will be printed of The Wish in a gesture that proposes the book as a sculptural artifact, carved from the wish to see poetry transacted in a way that reflects its cultural value.