Poetry occupies a singular position within contemporary culture. It remains one of the oldest and most concentrated technologies of meaning, while entering an environment increasingly shaped by automated language, generative systems, and infrastructures that process expression as data, prompt, or asset. Within this condition, Ana María Caballero has developed a practice that does not simply place poetry inside digital or institutional frameworks. It redefines poetry as object, structure, and site of responsibility.
Her work brings literary language into contact with blockchain systems, collectible formats, exhibition design, and computational mediation. Through this movement, poetry acquires a new legibility. It appears not only as text to be read, but as a material and conceptual form through which authorship, permanence, care, and value can be tested. Caballero’s practice therefore operates on two intertwined levels. It preserves the intimacy and density of poetic language while exposing the systems that decide how language circulates, survives, and becomes culturally visible.
This framework becomes especially clear in Entre domingo y domingo, the installation that offers one of the most precise entry points into her broader research. Presented at Galería Max Estrella in Madrid, the work extends the logic of Caballero’s first poetry collection into space, transforming reading into a physical and temporal experience. Everyday garments, poems printed on fabric, red thread, wooden clothespins, silence, and voice compose an environment in which the poem leaves the page and enters architecture.
The installation is structured through alternation. Sunday poems appear on T shirts, while non Sunday poems inhabit collared shirts. What appears at first as a minimal formal distinction becomes a deeper articulation of lived time. The work gives spatial form to two coexisting rhythms: the exceptional interval that interrupts routine, and the ordinary sequence that sustains existence. In this gesture, Caballero does not illustrate the themes of the book. She reorganizes them as a system of relations, allowing the visitor to read through movement, distance, sequencing, and pause.
The material intelligence of the installation is fundamental. Months of planning shaped the exact tonality of the fabric so that it could evoke the page without reducing itself to representation. The thickness and chromatic intensity of the red thread were tested until the stitch could operate visually as a dash from afar. This decision matters because the stitch does not function as decoration. It binds text to textile, verse to body, and language to labor. It turns writing into an act of attachment and continuation.
That gesture opens one of the central coordinates of Caballero’s work. Authorship appears here as inscription through effort, rather than authorship as abstraction or pure claim. The poem is carried on the back of the garment, where meaning aligns with what is borne, repeated, and lived. The red thread also recalls intertextuality, a concept Caballero repeatedly activates across her practice. Writing emerges through contact with prior language, through revision, citation, overlay, and response. The poetic voice acquires force not through isolation, but through the truthful pressure of lived experience entering an already layered field.
This is why Entre domingo y domingo matters so deeply within the larger argument of Caballero’s practice. It demonstrates that poetry can function as infrastructure without losing intimacy. The clothesline becomes a device of reading. The garment becomes a carrier of memory. The gallery becomes a structure for attention. The voice recording that accompanies the installation adds another register, allowing each visitor to encounter the poems across visual, spatial, and auditory time. Poetry, in this setting, becomes an inhabited system.
That transformation resonates far beyond the installation itself. Across Caballero’s engagement with blockchain inscription, book sculptures, AI mediated works, and institutional contexts, the same question returns with increasing clarity: under which conditions does language remain accountable to human experience while moving through technical, financial, and cultural systems that tend toward abstraction? Her work does not treat permanence as a symbolic ideal. It approaches endurance as a material and ethical choice. It does not approach the market as a simple site of validation. It uses economic visibility to expose historical exclusions around literary labor. It does not approach AI as a substitute for poetic thought. It places computational systems under pressure by insisting on voice, embodiment, and interpretive depth.
The result is a practice that expands poetry beyond its conventional enclosures while preserving its critical density. Caballero does not dissolve literature into technology, nor does she protect it through nostalgic separation. She constructs a threshold where poem, object, ledger, body, and institution meet. In that threshold, poetry becomes legible as a living form of custody.
To deepen these questions, Fakewhale developed a Dialog Flow with Ana María Caballero focused on authorship, permanence, intimacy, AI, value, and stewardship, tracing how her practice reshapes the place of poetry within contemporary systems of culture.
Authorship Beyond Property
Fakewhale: In a moment when language models and generative systems increasingly speak on behalf of humans, how do you define poetic authorship today without reverting to a romantic or proprietary notion of the author?
Ana María Caballero: Authorship has never been singular. Even before AI, invention was refracted, a garden of forking paths. Literature is a system of echoes, citations and corrections.
In my Being Borges series, for example, in which I write original poems for each work, the poems appear in red ink because when we write in red, we’re usually writing over something else. Red marks intertextuality. My project openly acknowledges that we’re always writing over what has come before.
Many of my books have the presence of poet guides, whose presence and language accompany the reader through my pages. Eliot and Lispector in A Petit Mal, Carson and Ferrante in Mammal, Cortázar and Maggie Nelson in /Cuts. These voices are not influences but conductors.
Poetry written with AI reeks of absence. There’s no soul. Perhaps authorship has to do with the presence of the self on the page.
I don’t think of authorship as ownership, rather as the truthful expression of lived experience, the moment an “I” spills from the page and touches another “I.”
Today, authorship also equals accountability. AI is not impartial: it casts long shadows. Naming these shadows is key.
Permanence, Access, and Endurance
Fakewhale: Your use of immutable ledgers introduces permanence into a cultural ecosystem shaped by acceleration and obsolescence. How do you think about the ethical and ecological responsibilities attached to endurance as a technical choice?
Ana María Caballero: My use of immutable ledgers was never about technological fetishism. It began with questions about disappearance, participation, valuation and the evolution of record keeping. By situating poetry within the blockchain ecosystem, within contemporary archival systems, I affirm its power to store lived experience.
Poetry is culturally revered yet absent from the contemporary art market. Introducing it within financialized infrastructures exposes several tensions: cultural versus economic worth, objectual versus networked materiality, insularity versus expansion.
These tensions are at the heart of my Book Sculptures series, which invert the value to scarcity ratio of the book, presenting it as an edition of one. Each also has a single poem, a poem that has been published in one of my books and is readily available for anyone to read.
Permanence is not neutral. Access and politics enter the equation of who gets to play, of whose cultural labor survives. I’m here to say that poetry gets to play.
Vulnerability Inside Institutional Systems
Fakewhale: Your writing often emerges from care, illness, and domestic labor, yet it circulates within financialized and institutional systems. What tensions arise when vulnerability becomes legible to infrastructures that were never designed to hold it?
Ana María Caballero: Much of my writing emerges from spaces that rarely appear in economic discourse: illness, care, domesticity. These are slow forms of labor historically feminized and invisibilized.
When those materials enter galleries, fairs or collectible formats, friction becomes inevitable. Projects like Literary Hooks, presented at ARCO Madrid this past March, make that tension explicit. By adopting the visual codes of retail display, garments, hangers, security tags, the work questions the circuits of value that determine what is protected, sold and consecrated as art.
The poem becomes a site where intimacy encounters the infrastructures that seek to price and value it. However, at the bottom of each piece, hand embroidered signatures in red interrupt the mechanically printed poems. The stitched name is irregular, time laden and resistant to reproduction.
Meanwhile, in my installation Entre domingo y domingo, garments hang from a clothing line, visualizing the creative proposal of my first book. This vulnerable setting becomes a locus for deep reading, for speaking the truths we bear on our backs.
In both projects, the implicit presence of the body denies the possibility of poetry’s heedless commodification.
AI, Authority, and Resistance
Fakewhale: As AI systems increasingly shape visibility, taste, and legitimacy in art, how do you prevent generative tools from reinforcing dominant norms or aesthetic homogenization within your own practice?
Ana María Caballero: AI systems have shaped visibility, taste and legitimacy across cultural fields for many years, but we seem to only be sounding the alarm now.
The risk is both automation and aesthetic flattening, a drift toward what is statistically dominant, another reason why poetry written with LLMs lands, well, flat.
In my practice, generative tools are either placed in situations where their authority becomes unstable, or they serve a communal, documentary function.
Being Borges exposes the mechanics of translation, human interpretation and algorithmic mediation, asking what’s at stake when language becomes literal via the visual.
In Paperwork and Speech Patterns the goal is not to collaborate with AI as a creative substitute, but to materialize shared experiences around poetry via digital and physical forms. Sculpture becomes an archive for ephemeral moments, stored in language that is then translated into AI inputs.
In Pace, I use cinematic AI to reconstruct and reimagine Calle del Barquillo in Madrid as a memory scape shaped by personal ritual instead of documentary accuracy.
I deliberately resist extractive or efficient uses of AI, instead foregrounding corporeality and voice as legitimate inputs into computational systems.
Poetry, Scarcity, and Cultural Value
Fakewhale: By positioning poetry as a collectible object, you challenge the historical undervaluation of literary labor. At the same time, scarcity reshapes access and readership. How do you negotiate this responsibility as both artist and infrastructure builder?
Ana María Caballero: Poetry occupies a strange position culturally: it’s symbolically revered but materially undervalued. By placing poetry within collectible structures, editioning, tokenization or fair circulation, I’m asking structural questions: what would it mean for literary labor to be economically viable?
At the same time, scarcity inevitably reshapes access. A collectible object can create value, but it can also restrict circulation.
Because of that, I build layered systems. The object, whether a tokenized poem, a sculptural book or a fair edition, may be scarce, but the language itself continues to circulate. The poem is never limited by its asset form. All the poems that conform my Literary Hooks series are from my published books.
My interest in showing work in places like art fairs is not about exclusivity. It’s about inserting poetry into economic arenas that have historically excluded it, while keeping the text tentacular and alive.
Stewardship and the Future Custodian
Fakewhale: When you imagine the future reader or custodian of your work, what forms of literacy, care, and institutional accountability do you believe must accompany these new poetic infrastructures?
Ana María Caballero: I imagine the future custodians of my works as a hybrid figure: reader, technologist, archivist.
New poetic infrastructures require new literacies. Technical literacy, to understand the systems that store or generate the text. Historical literacy, to situate the work within literary traditions. And ethical literacy, to maintain the work without reducing it to data or speculation.
Projects like my artist book, Ropa sucia, or Speech Patterns depend not only on preservation but on interpretation.
If the twentieth century asked who owns the text, the twenty first may ask a different question: who maintains it, and under what values? The future of poetry depends not only on authorship, but also on stewardship.
