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
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
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Once
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Fathomless
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