Ana María Caballero on Poetry, Blockchain and AI Ahead of First Institutional Survey in Linz
Colombian-American poet Ana María Caballero, who resides in Madrid and Miami, is set to launch her inaugural institutional survey titled 'Read the Room' at the Francisco Carolinum museum in Linz, Austria, where it will be on display until 7 February. This exhibition showcases her transformation of poetry into both digital and physical art over the past decade. In 2021, she co-founded the Web3 poetry gallery theVERSEverse, and in 2024, Sotheby's made history by selling her poem 'Cord' through Bitcoin, marking its first crypto transaction for an individual poem. Featured in her collection 'Mammal' (2024), 'Cord' will be joined by 'Echo Graph' in a Berlin exhibition in 2025. Caballero's notable projects also include 'Fifty Ways of Looking at a Poem' and 'Being Borges' (2023–26), alongside a collaboration involving Federico García Lorca's work.
Key facts
- Ana María Caballero's first institutional survey, 'Read the Room', is on view at Francisco Carolinum in Linz, Austria, through 7 February.
- In 2024, Sotheby's sold Caballero's poem 'Cord' via Bitcoin, the auction house's first crypto sale of an individual poem and first sale of a poem by a living poet.
- Caballero cofounded the Web3 poetry gallery theVERSEverse in 2021.
- 'Cord' first appeared in Caballero's collection 'Mammal' (2024).
- Her poem 'Echo Graph' was expanded into a 2025 exhibition at Office Impart in Berlin, including a motion-capture video and a single-edition book repeating the poem 197 times.
- The buyer of the 'Echo Graph, Book Sculpture' also received a video of Caballero reading the poem and an inscription of it on the bitcoin blockchain.
- Caballero's project 'Fifty Ways of Looking at a Poem' began with a love poem, 'Another Airport Poem', annotated by 50 people and later turned into an installation, performance, video and NFT collection.
- Her project 'Being Borges' (2023–26) uses text-to-image generative AI to visualize creatures from Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero's 'The Book of Imaginary Beings' (1957).
Entities
Artists
- Ana María Caballero
- Jorge Luis Borges
- Margarita Guerrero
- Norman Thomas di Giovanni
- Federico García Lorca
Institutions
- theVERSEverse
- Sotheby's
- Office Impart
- Francisco Carolinum
- ArtReview
- Tezos
Locations
- Madrid
- Spain
- Miami
- United States
- Colombia
- Berlin
- Germany
- Linz
- Austria