"such physical failure / a not uncommon thing" accompanies a unique, eponymous print from Ana María Caballero's solo exhibition, Echo Graph, which presents a single poem in multiple ways, exploring how the medium through which verse is experienced affects the meaning it conveys.
Echo Graph brings together Caballero’s performative, sculptural, conceptual and written work–crossing over from digital into analog realms with such ease that the boundary between these becomes blurred to the point of irrelevance. The pieces in this exhibition challenge notions of materiality and immersion, asking us to bear witness to the ways language takes hold within and without our bodies.
For this exhibition, Caballero created a micro poetic film. A limited series of stills from Echo Graph, the video work, debuted alongside it. These photographic images were selected to evoke the motion of the video work as well as lean into the narrative elements of the poem. Indeed, different printed timestamps from the choreographic work correspond to the same verse, representing the fluidity of how poetry is generated and perceived.
Caballero’s work often privileges the fragment over the whole to show how memory is stored. The fragments of verse are both modular and independent – conveying meaning as stand-alone prints yet suggestive of a larger story, one the viewer can create on their own.
Produced in close collaboration with Mad Arts. Presented at Office Impart in Berlin on February 2025.