by Jeffrey Grunthaner // Sept. 23, 2026
This article is part of our feature topic Performativity.
In Ana María Caballero’s work, private experience becomes something another person can inhabit. Her recent poetry collection, ‘Material,’ explores language as a performative force: oaths transform relationships, words wound or repair and writing changes the status of an experience. This concern with what language does, rather than merely signifies, extends beyond the page into Caballero’s work with installation, video, sculpture and performance.
Ahead of a busy month that includes her first institutional retrospective at the Francisco Carolinum in Linz and the debut of her installation ‘In Your Own Words’ at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, we discussed the performative possibilities of poetry, from acts of reading and translation to the public staging of private experience.
Ana Maria Caballero: ‘Read the Room,’ 2026, exhibition view at Francisco Carolinum // Photo by Manuel Carreon Lopez / kunst-documentation.com
Jeffrey Grunthaner: ‘In Your Own Words’ seems to take translation beyond language and into other media. Is that fair to say?
Ana María Caballero: That’s very accurate in describing my work in general, actually. For this exhibition, I am translating my poetry in a very literal sense. There’s be a world map that traces where my poems were written and where they were translated. Visitors will be able to write those verses in their own words, in their own language and then pin those fragments of verse that they’ve translated into the places where they call home on the map. It becomes this interactive record of belonging, of the places we’ve all called home and how home is a reflection of how we speak.
The truth is, I call home wherever I’m able to speak Spanglish comfortably. The whole premise is that we wear language like skin and how we speak really is a reflection of who and where we are and where we’ve been.
Another component of the exhibition has poems printed onto t-shirts, sewn with red thread. Red is a recurring theme in my work: when we write in red, we’re usually correcting existing language, writing over something. But, in my view, we’re always writing over what has come before.
You can actually purchase one of these shirts in the language that most suits you, or with the poem that you most connect with. Each shirt is outfitted with a security tag—these objects of surveillance and value, as well. The premise here is for people to remove the security tags themselves. We’re going to have these security alarms amassed into this sculptural record of collective readership, of all these people that are taking poems home and wearing language like skin.
There is this whole tracing of how we wear language very intimately, but also how reading becomes an act of ownership. When we read something, we make it our own.
Ana Maria Caballero: ‘In Your Own Words,’ 2026, installation view at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg // © Marek Kruszewski
JG: What happens to your sense of authorship when something as personal as a poem becomes collaborative or participatory? Or is relinquishing control part of what allows the work to become public?
AMC: Readers and writers construct each other in a process that I call analog generativity. Readership is an endless procreative process, whereby every reading becomes its own universe. If we read something this morning or we read it tomorrow, it will be a different experience.
I’m not very precious about thinking that I own my poems. I want them to circulate. I want people to wear them, to connect with them in a really intimate way that resonates beyond the page. When we’re going through our lives and a line of verse that we read, or an artwork, or a scene from a movie pops back into our head that moment of being invaded by an artwork is so powerful. I’m only hopeful that my poetry will arrive in that manner, in someone’s life, and stay with them.
From the very personal we access the universal. Maybe one of the reasons why AI poetry is usually kind of bland is because it’s very general. It’s usually just very large statements, or abstract.
Ana Maria Caballero: ‘Speech Patterns,’ 2026, Venezia Editions, installation view at Art Brussels // Courtesy of Office Impart
JG: When a poem translates into a different medium, do you ever find anything in it that you didn’t expect?
AMC: It expands what the poem does for me personally. For a work like ‘Pace,’ which debuted last year at Berlin Art Week, or for a video work like ‘Echo Graph,’ which is part of my retrospective and also shown at the Toledo Museum, when I translated them into performances that have more layers of meaning attached, they became more potent. They become narrower or sharper arrows, able to pierce the reader.
‘Echo Graph,’ for example, when you read it in my book ‘Mammal’—that’s my prior book—I don’t necessarily think it’s the best poem in the book, or the most lyrical, or the most surprising with uses of language, etc. But when it became this really transgressive video work in which I put myself inside the womb to reclaim a traumatic experience, it became much more resonant. Now it has all these other layers of vibration.
Ana Maria Caballero: ‘Read the Room,’ 2026, exhibition view at Francisco Carolinum // Photo by Manuel Carreon Lopez / kunst-documentation.com
JG: There are moments in ‘Material’ when language seems less descriptive than performative—where words change the status of an experience. How does this carry over when the act of reading itself becomes part of an exhibition?
AMC: In a project like ’50 Ways of Looking at a Poem,’ which is part of the retrospective, I ask 50 different people to read and annotate the same poem. I picked a short love poem about long-distance relationships that hopefully everyone could relate to.
It grew into this object kind of experience because everyone was annotating and marking it up, and how they intervened in these prints of the poem became the artwork in and of itself. Marginalia became the artwork.
The language of the poem starts fusing and growing and expanding and shape-shifting based on how people didn’t get it, or got it, or loved it, or marked it up. It’s like taking it out of that private space of reading into much more of a public, exhibitionist environment, in which connections still remain private, but you stage that connection for others to view.
There were things, phrases in that poem, that I didn’t think were doing so much, that I later realized really resonated with people, especially the title. It’s called ‘Another Airport Call,’ and people really had a lot to say about the title.
Ana Maria Caballero: ‘Read the Room,’ 2026, exhibition view at Francisco Carolinum // Photo by Manuel Carreon Lopez / kunst-documentation.com
JG: We’re talking about exhibitions, but there’s also a kind of performativity involved in these different contexts—something that changes the poem, or at least how it’s perceived.
AMC: There is something within this form of performativity that speaks to the value of language. For example, the book sculpture: there’s almost like a negative performance happening because when you buy a book with 200 pages, you expect 200 different pages. But these books have 200 of the same page. It’s the same poem over and over and over and over. It’s almost like a negative performance because you read one page, you’ve read them all.
But then the performance of reading is called into question, and also the performance of assigning value to artworks, which is a very public, showy event. You think of auctions and art fairs.
There’s only one book of each of these book sculptures, and each only has one poem in its pages. I’m asking: How do we value poetry? How does language acquire value within contemporary art? Can we value a poem as a sculptural object in the same way we value a bust of a head forged out of marble? Because to forge a poem is almost like it’s the same kind of craft, in a way.
JG: Interestingly, you have a poem titled ‘Monument,’ in which you describe a family posing happily for a photograph after an argument. You write, “I would not call it fake—it’s very real: / the way we try / to appear / happy together.” Does performance necessarily stand in opposition to authenticity, or can it disclose something just as real?
AMC: I actually turned this work into a video poem. I took CC0 footage of families posing in front of monuments, or posing for holiday pictures, through history and then the present day, to show how the family portrait has evolved over time.
If you look at the past, the family portrait was this very serious, somber affair. People are just staring at the camera, and you got one shot. But now everyone is like, “Smile for the camera,” right?
For me, that effort is performative because it projects this notion of joy when maybe there isn’t real joy. But there’s something very noble about it, and tender. That, for me, is what the poem is really about.
Artist Info
Exhibition Info
FC Francisco Carolinum Linz
Ana María Caballero: ‘Read the Room’
Exhibition: Sept. 9, 2026-Feb. 7, 2027
ooekultur.at
OÖ Landes-Kultur GmbH, Museumstraße 14, 4010 Linz, Austria, click here for map
Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg
Group Show: ‘Tell Me Where Home Is’
Exhibition: Sept. 19, 2026-Jan. 17, 2027
kunstmuseum.de
Hollerpl. 1, 38440 Wolfsburg, Germany, click here for map
