Ana María Caballero: Latch

Latch is from Caballero's Book Sculptures, an eight-part series that interrogates the economic, archival and technological structures through which language acquires value. Language is among humanity’s earliest storage technologies — a tool designed to outlast the limits of the body. The book stabilized this function, while digital media transformed language into endlessly reproducible data. Meanwhile, video restored the presence of the speaking voice, long suppressed by print. As cultural memory increasingly migrates toward immaterial networks, the question of how language endures becomes newly urgent. Caballero’s series addresses this question and positions poetry within an evolving continuum of record-keeping systems that extends from the codex to the moving image to cryptographic inscription.This series proposes the book as a sculptural object and will see Caballero print eight different books, each as an edition of one, with a unique ISBN and the anatomy and structure of a traditional book. The books in this series contain only one poem, printed 197 times in their pages. When taken as integers, the digits in 197 add up eventually to 8, a number that represents abundance. The works in this series are stunning objects yet remain very authentically books, with a table of contents, an author page and a dedication, which is hand-signed and dedicated to its collector. The physical books are accompanied by a video work of a single page endlessly turning while Caballero reads the poem (minted onto the Ethereum blockchain via the artist’s own smart contract), in addition to this inscription of the poem onto the Bitcoin blockchain – repositioning poetry within contemporary systems of display, transaction and record. The series documents how our file storage mechanisms have evolved: from page, to pixel, to decentralized ledger.