0x5a6a···070bMarch 17, 2025
Echo Graph will have a special showing at Sunderland's public arts initiative, ExpoSunderland, in the UK during April, 2025. ExpoSunderland features an immersive, transparent 3D screen in the town's main city center, hinging the city's urban renewal around public art.
Footage from the sound tests can be found here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1IBA1JyCe9yZi0OgaAfk_z_2t8clHDvso?usp=share_link
Information about ExpoSunderland's artist programming:
https://www.exposunderland.com/expo-pavilion/arts-programme
0x5a6a···070bMarch 15, 2025
Echo Graph debuted at my solo exhibition at Office Impart on February 20th in Berlin. This show 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 my performative, sculptural, conceptual and written work to challenge notions of materiality and immersion, asking us to bear witness to the ways language takes hold within and without our bodies.
At the root of the exhibition is a single poem, Echo Graph, from my book MAMMAL, which narrates the moment I'm informed by a doctor that my placenta has stopped working and my first-born son must be taken out immediately. I end up on a glacial operating table for an emergency C-section after my child’s heart-rate drops during induced contractions of birth. The doctors then realize that my placenta was fine.
Taking place twelve years later, this exhibition vindicates trauma through its transformation in art. The original poem is not driven by anger but by a desire to document. In “publishing” one poetic text in manifold ways, I become an artist, body, writer who has seized control.
Though physical failure here is defined by others, namely, a medical face, the vocal delivery and choreographic score question its validity. In Echo Graph, the body transmits the layers of subversion hidden in the written text to create rich strata of complementary and contradictory meanings, as often happens in everyday exchanges.
Recorded via motion-capture technology, this new work continues my explorations of how physical movement can translate the spoken-word, using body language to unleash the vital, guttural essence of communication.
Professional installation shots of the exhibition:
https://www.dropbox.com/home/poem%20equals%20art%20Team%20Folder/Echo%20Graph/Expo%20at%20OFFICE%20IMPART?share_manage_access=false
Photographs from opening night:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/12QFftmtx3wRk5sxCRjdxQk2XFqBlvA2f?usp=share_link
The curatorial text from the exhibition, written by Doreen Ríos:
https://anamariacaballero.com/will-the-body-of-the-poem-please-stand-up/
0x5a6a···070bAfter going through my husband's files, I finally found the records of my son Lorenzo's ultrasound., along with images of his first day on earth. I now remember that my husband gifted me my first iPhone when my son was born, so that I could easily take better pictures of him.
My son's birth, then, marked two major changes to my life: motherhood and the smart phone era, with the expansions and invasions that each implied.
Here are photos of Lorenzo right before he was born and shortly after he arrived: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1iHiR6rVv_TjOow7l2SI58as16EUT1D-t?usp=drive_link
0x5a6a···070bOctober 30, 2024
I wrote this poem months after my first son was born, having only partly processed the moment of his birth--a botched induction that resulted in an emergency cesarean after a doctor erroneously diagnosed me with a failed placenta. When my son was born, he weighed much more than the doctor had represented, and my placenta proved healthy.
I had spent the entire pregnancy preparing for a natural birth, physically, mentally and emotionally. I was hoping to stay off drugs as much as possible and fully experience the moment. Instead, I ended up alone in a glacial operating room after my son's heart rate dropped during induced contractions of birth.
Echo Graph leaves all these details out. When I wrote the poem, I was still unable to face what had happened, despite needing to record the experience in some way. This poem documents the moment I began to use language to come to terms--literally, to find the words--with a traumatic moment.
The video work expands the original intent of the poem in that it visually represents both resistance and entrapment. The body moves in ways it cannot move inside the womb. Indeed, an adult body has no place inside a uterine cave. And yet, the adult body seizes ownership of space via confident motion.
I named the piece Echo Graph only after creating the video work because I loved the idea of how the unsaid reverberates, leaving a trail of perceivable marks, or graphs. (But the poem, as published in my book Mammal, was named Placental.)
It's especially meaningful that my personal experience echoed with the work's collector. This work, through its exchange, carves a connection between my embodied experience and its collector's own memories, thus becoming an echo graph of Echo Graph.
Images from the ultrasound of my second child, Nina, born via a compulsory C-section, can be found in this folder:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1HGcxLKMAWLJTureKxKXtMqSt-XYA3qUz?usp=drive_link