art
Paperwork
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.
She was so moved by the small pieces of paper and by the swan that she focused her image creation on origami to honor paper’s eloquence, its haptic, sculptural qualities—presenting paper as the message in and of itself, not solely as messenger.
The 100 digital paper sculptures that conform Paperwork capture performances at NFT Show Europe in Valencia, at Bright Moments Gallery and at NeueHouse Hollywood in Los Angeles and at Casas Riegner Gallery in Bogotá.
Caballero created separate long-form generative AI sub-series to honor each city, rooting the works in the architectural elements of each place. For the Valencia works, Caballero referenced the structures of Maestro Santiago Calatrava, who created this location’s Ciudad de las Artes y de las Ciencias. For the Bogotá series, she invoked the forms of Colombia’s legendary Rogelio Salmona. The sculptures grounded in Los Angeles evoke elements of California Modernism.
Paperwork fuses the personal to the public and the public to the collective, calling forth the materiality of poetry and the tangible power of the digital. This collection also conveys poetry’s ability to store and transfer memory. Nothing is more meaningful than the ephemeral experiences that linger within us, bringing flashes of significance and connection to our lives.
When we transact, we share, we give, we receive–we assign value. Paperwork celebrates the significance of moments shared with others and the renewed cultural currency afforded to poetry via digital transactability.
Select press on Paperwork:
—Nftnow, Ana Caballero’s Origami “Paperwork” Sells Out at Bright Moments Buenos Aires
—OpenSea, In Conversation with Ana María Caballero of theVERSEverse
—LeRandom, Ana María Caballero’s Paperwork
—Bright Moments Quarterly, Ana María Caballero’s Paperwork
More about the project:
