Ana María Caballero

Unraveling is the fifth edition from Ana María Caballero’s Book Sculptures, an eight-part series that questions how society values poetry. This series proposes the book as a sculptural object and will see Caballero print eight different books, each as an edition of one, with a unique ISBN and the anatomy and structure of a traditional book. The books in this series contain only one poem, printed 197 times in their pages. When taken as integers, the digits in 197 add up to 8, a number of abundance. The physical 1/1 book is accompanied by a 1/1 video work that presents a single page of the book endlessly turning while Caballero reads the poem, highlighting an important through-line in Caballero’s work: the fusion of poetic and physical voice. This video work is purposefully minimal to underscore the piece’s sound element and present poetic language as art in and of itself. Indeed, the digital wields something the page cannot: voice. The work includes a third element, a text-only Bitcoin inscription, with no visuals attached. Caballero's Book Sculptures describe the ways our story-telling evolved – from page, to digital media, to decentralized ledger. By inscribing her verse onto Bitcoin, the mother of all blockchains, Caballero nods to our future but also to our past, when we carved our memories onto stone. Caballero's intentionally unadorned video work also honors poetry's oral tradition, when verse was shared through voice. This poem is from Caballero’s prize-winning book Mammal.