by Carolina Sculti // Feb. 24, 2026
Unlike many future-oriented AI art exhibitions, ‘Glitch in a Garden of Whispers’ approaches the topic through the exploration of something much older—the art of translation. Mirroring the functions of artificial intelligence, Nicole L’Huillier and Ana Maria Caballero take a refreshingly material and poetic approach to examining how language and meaning transform and degrade as they move through interpretations and mediums. The exhibition space is conceived as a metaphorical garden, where each artist begins with a “seed”—a literary text—and their pieces grow under the combined conditions of cultural context, personal interpretation and algorithmic randomness.
For this show, which is curated by Clara Meister, L’Huillier and Caballero each use the Spanish texts of prominent literary figures as their starting points, which are then translated into English, before employing algorithmic sound processing and image generation, respectively, to create contemporary, interactive reinterpretations of these classic works.
Ana María Caballero and Nicole L’Huillier: ‘Glitch in a Garden of Whispers,’ 2026, installation view at Aedes // Photo by Erik-Jan Ouwerkerk
Whispers and vibrations resonate throughout the high-ceilinged, brick-walled room, projected from two bird-like, winged speakers as a part of Nicole L’Huillier’s installation, ‘Cuchicheos.’ Hanging in the center is a multi-colored banner of sound-embedded silicone membranes. Each piece of the banner contains its own speaker, which in turn vocalizes a different version of Gabriela Mistral’s poem ‘La Contadora (The Teller of Tales),’ translated by Ursula K. Le Guin over a span of five years. Le Guin understood translation as an act of discovery, focusing on cultural observation and listening rather than linguistic substitution. Mistral, the first South American writer to receive the Nobel Prize in 1945, wrote ‘La Contadora’ about the way stories pass through us and our environments. This story about storytelling has survived and transformed through distinctly human systems—translation, cultural memory, social structures for recognition—and in L’Huillier’s installation mutates further into sounds, making audible the inevitable change and loss that occur when meaning travels.
Ana María Caballero and Nicole L’Huillier: ‘Glitch in a Garden of Whispers,’ 2026, installation view at Aedes // Photo by Erik-Jan Ouwerkerk
The installation appears silent until you press your ear against the speaker underneath the spray-painted spot, prompting the physical enactment of the effort to understand. It feels like a game of broken telephone; listening closely to each membrane one after the other, each sound unique and more mutated than the last. Recognizable words become high-pitched, crackly, glitchy static, reminiscent of a radio that’s losing connection. There’s a feeling of helplessness in the act of trying to understand; knowing it’s impossible to derive the poem’s intended meaning from the distorted sound.
Nicole L’Huillier: ‘Cuchicheos,’ 2026, installation view at Aedes // Photo by Erik-Jan Ouwerkerk
Just behind this colorful installation is Ana María Caballero’s 12-part series ‘Being Borges,’ which reinterprets Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘Book of Imaginary Beings.’ The works hang from the ceiling at opposing angles, giving the feeling that one is walking through the pages of an open book. Each piece is two-sided: on one side, there are three versions of one of Borges’ texts—the original, Norman Thomas di Giovanni’s English translation and Caballero’s own interpretations or responsive poems; on the other side are selected AI-generated images, chosen from a larger aggregation.
The original text ‘Book of Imaginary Beings,’ written in 1975, is known for its stylistic confusion in tone, content and chronology and its blur of truth and mythology. Caballero’s AI interpretations of these stories can be initially disorienting: the same story is rendered in three images, each so different you can hardly identify the common thread between them. Experiencing the works feels like working backward through translation—tracing elements from image to text and theorizing about how each linguistic choice may have shaped the outcome of the image generation. Stepping back from the closeness of a single story’s mystery, the scale becomes apparent: infinite possibilities shaped by randomness, cultural context and our accumulated archive of imagination. Our mental model of translation as something to be measured with accuracy, or story as something to be measured with truth, is shattered.
Ana María Caballero: ‘Being Borges,’ 2026 // Courtesy of the artist
What stands out about this exhibition is its intimate relationship to the authors who reimagined storytelling and translation beyond linguistics or so-called “objectivity.” The impulse to tell, retell and distort stories is as ancient as it is human, and as our stories become intertwined with technology, our impulses become embedded in technology itself. The opacity of the AI processes in these installations is frustrating—the inability to see what triggers a distortion, fabrication or total loss. But as you spend time with these pieces, this frustration becomes recognizable as one fundamental to human interaction. Meaning is processed individually, and communication is always partial. The works suggest a diversion from clarity, truth and accuracy, an acceptance of the meanings we create inside conditions of infinite possibility—the same conditions through which stories and experiences have always traveled.
Exhibition Info
Aedes
Nicole L’Huillier and Ana María Caballero: ‘Glitch in a Garden of Whispers’
Exhibition: Feb. 14–March. 18, 2026
aedes-arc.de
Christinenstr. 18–19, 10119 Berlin, click here for map
