Caballero giving the first digital poetry performance at Art Genève, hosted by Giga/UNICEF. Photo: Marc Bader, 2025

The biggest downside to being an editor when you launched your career as a writer is that you still feel that bone-deep compulsion to write. The challenge, of course, is finding the time, which is why the below conversation with transdisciplinary artist and digital poetry pioneer Ana María Caballero took place many months ago, before she signed with Spain’s leading new media gallery, Max Estrella, and before MACBA in Barcelona and the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid confirmed they’d be adding her work to their collections. Since we spoke, she was also named a finalist for the HOFA Gallery Digital Art Awards in the Innovation category, and more recently, a finalist in the Still Image Award category of the Lumen Prize for The Sylphs from her “Being Borges” series (marking her fifth Lumen Prize nomination). Earlier this month, her new manuscript was awarded Trio House Press’ Editors’ Selection in Poetry and, as she graciously informed me via email just today, her first novel has won Texas Review Press’ Clay Reynolds Novella Prize.

Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter

Thank you for signing up!

By clicking submit, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime.

As you might infer, Caballero’s official bio is absolutely replete with well-deserved awards, grants and accolades. It’s also peppered with tech jargon (Bitcoin Ordinals, Web3, crypto art) that seem at first glance like a curious mismatch to the traditional wordsmithing that has seen her publish several books of poetry. But she is nothing if not exceedingly patient and ready to explain—in ways even your grandma could understand—just what she means when she talks about “placing poems on chain.” Poems, she tells me, “traditionally didn’t find their way into museums, galleries or art collectors’ homes,” and yet hers have found their way into all three in various forms.

Waiting Room, which debuted at Art Dubai in 2024, combined performance, spoken-word poetry, choreography, photography and blockchain provenance. Fifty Ways of Looking at a Poem, a durational work she describes as an “analog generative system,” was acquired by a major private collector and will be shown at the Francisco Carolinum in Linz. “Echo Graph,” her first solo show in Germany at OFFICE IMPORT gallery, stretches a single poem across mediums: film, stills, sculpture. Her next project—a new, choreographic video work called Pace that is an homage to Pipilotti Rist’s Ever is Over All—will debut, also with OFFICE IMPART, next month during Berlin Art Week.

“Her practice seeks to make poetry, the most ephemeral thing possible, more tangible,” Load gallery founder Alex Simorré told me not long after I spoke with Caballero. “She’s found numerous ways to do so—her verse turned into video, A.I.-generated paper sculptures, physical sculptures, book sculptures, and the list goes on.” Caballero’s artworks have even made their mark in the auction world. CORD was the first poem by a living poet sold in the history of Sotheby’s, but if you’re imagining something like a framed piece of paper, you’re still not thinking like Caballero. While the buyer did receive a signed print of the poem, what they actually bid on was a unit of Bitcoin inscribed with the poem—the aforementioned ‘ordinal.’

“Placing poems on chain feels natural,” she told me. “If I had started by putting my poems onto........

© Observer