Fifty Ways of Looking at a Poem is an analog generative system, one that celebrates the ways writers and readers construct each other by turning human readership into a procreative system.
In this series, Caballero invited fifty different people to read and annotate the same poem, performing their experience of its verse via hand-written marginalia. The series' name is rooted in Wallace Stevens' “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” a seminal work of modernist literature.
Caballero filmed a durational performance in which she hung each poem from two parallel clothing lines on a rooftop in Madrid. The clothing line is a recurring motif in her practice, representing the act of accessing the transcendental through the mundane. She then performed the poem in front of the clothing lines.
The durational performance consists of three videos united as one: the hanging of the poems from each of the two clothing lines and the recording of her reading.
Caballero digitized the annotated poems and offered them as a collaborative, digital-only collection. She preserved the original 50 physical poems, which, together with this performance, comprise a single work.
anamariacaballero.com