Radical Repair is the first work from Ana María Caballero’s Speech Patterns series, which marks the next chapter in her investigation of voice, form and translation, evolving her explorations of performance-driven materiality.
In her series Paperwork, audience reactions to her performed verse were translated into digital and physical paper sculptures, each representing one individual’s experience of her spoken verse. Caballero turned these reactions into raw material, using audience members’ handwritten responses to actuate compositions from latent space that visualized the relationship between speaker and listener.
With Speech Patterns, she looks upstream: the words she prepares for her performances become the originating material. Here, drafts, rhythms, pauses, inflections are not simply scripts but substrates, giving rise to sculptures, both digital and physical, that materialize live performance in three-dimensional form.
The relationship shifts: where the audience’s reactions once determined structure, now the performer’s internal speech architecture becomes the generator. Caballero’s Speech Patterns are not born from interpretation but from intent.
The digital realm remains a key terrain: words rendered into form traverse screen and object, virtual and tangible. But the conceptual locus shifts. Speech Patterns is less about how the audience shapes the work, and more about how the artist’s internal linguistic scaffolding can generate its own visual counterpart, transforming the architecture of voice into sculpture.
Here, sculpture becomes both archive and proposition: a speech-act frozen into shape.
Accompanying physical sculpture.
Edition of 3 + 1 AP