plain as clear, cold gel is a single edition still from Ana María Caballero's Echo Graph series, which brings together the artist’s performative, visual, conceptual and written work.
At the heart of this series is an eponymous micro poetic film, Echo Graph, which narrates the moment the artist is informed by a doctor that her placenta has stopped working and her first-born son must be taken out immediately. After her child’s heart-rate drops during induced contractions of birth, Caballero ends up on a glacial operating table with an emergency C-section. The doctors then realize that her placenta is fine.
Created twelve years later, Echo Graph vindicates trauma through its transformation in art. By occupying the space of the womb, Caballero becomes an artist, body, writer who regains control.
A limited number of stills from the film were created, evoking motion and suggesting the narrative arch of the poem.
Caballero’s work often privileges the fragment over the whole to show how memory and meaning are stored. These timestamped fragments of verse are both modular and independent – conveying stand-alone moments that suggest a larger story, one the viewer can create on their own.
The Echo Graph series asks us to bear witness to the ways language takes hold within and without our bodies. It was first presented at Caballero’s solo exhibition at Office Impart, Berlin in February 2025.
anamariacaballero.com