Paperwork

Ana María Caballero

Artwork description:

Paperwork, 2023. Documentation of Caballero's live reading in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The final act in Paperwork's system of generative verse.

One by one, Caballero hand-signed 100 sheets of paper, each containing a single printed word, written by hands months ago in response to her performed verse. She worked with the Bright Moments team to install these words into an ephemeral paper sculpture, which would be disassembled at the end of that very same day. She then performed four of her poems in a small theater in Buenos Aires. At the end of this performance, she asked attendees to visit the installation. One by one, the printed words were selected by new hands, summoning a corresponding digital paper sculpture and closing her system of performed, generative verse.

Paperwork, 2023. Documentary footage.

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 100 of 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. Paperwork's final act saw Caballero perform her verse in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she set up an installation with the 100 printed words, handwritten by others throughout the year. At the end of this performance, she invited attendees to take a word from the installation that most closely represented their own experience of her verse, triangulating two complete strangers via her poetry in a moment of shared connection.

Being Borges

VALIDERINGSØPPELET