From September 19 till October 19, the Load gallery, Barcelona’s youngest and most technologically advanced art space, is delighted to host Fine Print — the exhibition dedicated to the evolution of poetic expression in art. Coinciding with the start of the busy Manifesta season, the show joins in celebrating the values of Europe’s Nomadic Biennial — fostering positive change through art. Presenting the works by two Lumen Prize finalists — Ana María Caballero and aurèce vettier — Fine Print is an investigation into the generation of meaning and value in spoken word and remembered image.
Poetry, often considered the oldest form of literature and art, has been pushed to the outskirts of artistic interest for both creatives and institutions. However, thanks to new web3 initiatives, such as the VERSEverse gallery, co-founded by Ana María Caballero, poetry is emerging into the frontlines of innovative expression, broadening our relationship with the spoken word. It “transcends the page” and takes forms of paintings, performances, drawings and AI-generated sculptures; deeply personal at the beginning, it seeks universal meaning as it reaches the public.
Memories and dreams, being the ‘fine print’ of our lives, take centre stage in the projects of Ana and aurèce. With the help of collective intelligence (the audience) and artificial intelligence, the artists transfuse their original datasets — poetry and image respectively — into new forms of comprehension. The resulting exhibition is a socially-engaged experiment in transcending genre norms and pushing the boundaries of creative exchange.
Ana María Caballero is a multidisciplinary literary artist with an impressive array of prizes and awards under her belt, including the latest edition of Lumen Prize, where 3 of her projects became finalists — an all-time record. She is the first woman to win Colombia’s José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize as well as the first living poet to sell a poem at Sotheby’s. She advocates for contemporary poetry and participates in many educational events across the world.
aurèce vettier is a project by Paul Mouginot, one of the few artists engaged in training their own algorithms and networks. Even the alias, formed by algorithm, is a metaphor for the artist’s desire for a collaborative, open and hybrid approach, which includes the use of more tactile genres, such as sculpture, painting, and textile. His works seamlessly cross from web3 to reality and back, nourishing the narrative with personal invocations.
Ana María Caballero will showcase 4 projects
Fifty Ways of Looking at a Poem, Paperwork, Literal Litoral, and Ultrasonido (Ultrasound).
Fifty Ways of Looking at a Poem celebrates the ways in which writers and readers construct each other. Readers give literature life within their minds, honouring words when they make them their own by leaving a mark. To create the work, Ana María Caballero invited fifty different people to read and annotate the same poem, Another Airport Poem, performing their experience of its verse via hand-written marginalia.
The combined, iterative interventions in this series represent the collective evolution of readership.
The Load gallery is proud to present five digital editions from the series, while the physical artworks from Fifty Ways of Looking at a Poem are exhibited at Vigo Contemporary Art Museum (MARCO) in Vigo, Spain.
Each of the five editions is available to collect as a digital artwork and includes the final signed prints of the Another Airport Poem. Collectors are invited to annotate these prints, thus participating as artists in this collection.
In addition, for the first time ever, two videos of performances from this series will be shown at Load.
Paperwork is a performance-based, long-form generative AI collection of digital paper sculptures carved from individual emotional responses to the spoken-word poetry of Ana María Caballero.
For the first time, Caballero presents an exciting expansion of the collection — physical sculptures. Two artist-owned works, “momento” (Paperwork 87) and “transmute” (Paperwork 97), have been cast as three dimensional objects, furthering Caballero’s explorations of the eloquence of the paper form.
Each piece will be accompanied by a special collector’s set that includes videos documenting the creation of the works.
Combining performance, spoken-word poetry, choreography, photography, and blockchain provenance, Caballero’s Literal Litoral series transcends the page, pushing the boundary of how poetry can be exhibited, experienced and transacted in the digital age. These performative works honour Caballero’s strong spoken-word history and poetry’s tradition of orality. In these multifaceted renditions of self, she speaks her poems, Waiting Room and Mammal, via movement, exploring how body language ties into spoken language.
Waiting Room, first presented at Art Dubai 2024 by Gazelli Art House, is from Caballero’s prize-winning book Mammal. Her narrative twists with the vicissitudes of caretaking. The intersecting Spanish, translating to “You, Me, Ours”, is a play on words that shifts the speaker’s intent. The formal division in Waiting Room prompts us to question the permeable boundaries between caring for ourselves and caring for others.
Mammal is the title poem from Caballero’s new book, and, also, a performative work with photography by Luis Gaspar. This piece includes an inscription of its text onto the Bitcoin blockchain.
Both Waiting Room and Mammal are sold out.
aurèce vettier will present 6 artworks from the project “le travail des rêves”, and poems from “we are the trees” among others
In “le travail des rêves”, aurèce vettier translates dreams into 100 AI-generated, low-resolution images, then oil paintings, created for Bright Moments Paris. Each piece blurs human-AI boundaries, inviting viewers to engage with their own memories.
The artist’s approach combines intimate, carefully curated data with powerful algorithms, projected into the real world using artisanal processes and skills such as painting, bronze sculpture, and tapestry. Since 2018, GANs have become an important component of aurèce vettier’s, allowing to propose an imaginary nature of near-impossible shapes. In late 2021, he began working with CLIP+GAN models, which allow the artist to generate images from text.
To create “le travail des rêves”, the artist first gathered a dataset — a large volume of photographs from his phone, all holding a sentimental value. The artist then fed this dataset to train a text-to-image CLIP+GAN, which he later used to generate images on a prompt, the resulting visuals resembling his initial photographs. The prompts were real dreams, experienced by the artist. The resulting images were then painted on a canvas, honouring the sensuality of the physical genres, thus, materialising the dreams.
Together with digital artworks from “le travail des rêves”, it is possible to acquire the corresponding physical oil painting.
aurece will also present his poetry, including a series of 5 poems, that are part of theVERSEverse project and always begin with the same sentence: “we are the trees”. All poems are inscribed on blockchain and available for purchase.
About the Artists
Ana María Caballero is a multidisciplinary Colombian-American literary artist whose work explores how biology delimits societal and cultural rites, ripping the veil off romanticised motherhood and questioning notions that package sacrifice as a virtue.
She’s the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including MAXXI Bvlgari Prize in the Digital Sector, the Beverly International Prize, the Academy of American Poets Prize, Colombia’s José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize, the Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize, the Kurt Brown Prize, the INDIES Book of the Year Award, the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and, most recently, the 2024 Lumen Prize.
Caballero is the author of Mammal (Steel Tool Books, 2024); Cortadas (forthcoming from S/W Ediciones, 2025); A Petit Mal (Black Spring Press, 2023); Tryst (Alexandria Publishing, 2022); mid-life (Finishing Line Press, 2016); Reverse Commute (Silver Birch Press, 2014); Entre domingo y domingo (Valparaíso Ediciones, 2023 and 2014).
Her Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net-nominated work has been published extensively and exhibited as fine art at museums and leading international venues, such as the Wroclaw Contemporary Museum, Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia, bitforms, Office Impart, Poetry Society of America, Gazelli Art House, New World Center and Times Square.
She’s been an artist-in-residence at GAZELL_iO, Glitch, Wild and VERTICAL. The first living poet to sell a digital poem at Sotheby’s and via live auction in Spain, Caballero has also released digital poems in partnership with TIME, Diario ABC and Playboy. She is a contributing writer for Forbes, reporting on Web3 culture.
Widely recognised as a digital poetry pioneer whose own practice is transforming the way language is exhibited, experienced and transacted, she’s also the co-founder of literary gallery theVERSEverse, short-listed for the Lumen Prize and the Digital Innovation in Art Award.
Caballero graduated with a magna cum laude degree from Harvard University, where she was awarded a grant by Madrid’s Complutense University to finalise her honours thesis work on the role of the café in sparking cultural revolutions. She holds and MFA in Poetry from Florida International University.
aurèce vettier is an art project founded in 2019 by Paul Mouginot (b. 1990). This identity, like all of aurèce vettier’s work, allows for a lot of back and forth between the “real” space in which it is possible to exist, to draw, paint, sculpt, break, erase; and the “data” space, where it is possible to play with more dimensions than a human can grasp — a gesture analogous to uploading and then downloading an image over and over again on an online platform.
In this virtual space, which may involve AI algorithms or heavy mathematical processing, aurèce vettier explores new forms, which are then deployed as tangible objects, in close connection with many crafts.
The approach is not to consider the machine-generated elements as a set of finished works, but rather as raw material expanding conceptual possibilities and complementing the initial knowledge of art history.
Poetry is the backbone of aurèce vettier’s entire practice, whose first work was to publish a book of poetry in collaboration with a machine. Without ever replacing the artist, the algorithms thus served as a camp aid, generating raw material that was subsequently assembled by hand.
His works were exhibited in many galleries across the world, including solo shows in Darmo Art (France), Bigaignon (France), Cultural Foundation of Tinos (Greece), and group shows in Studios Gohard with Spaceless Gallery (USA), Feÿ Arts Festival (France), Galerie Gosserez (France), EXPANDED.ART (Germany), Le Transfo (France), and more. aurèce has participated in The Digital Art Mile 2o24 with Cinello Unlimited, Art Paris 2023 with Spaceless Gallery, Asia Now 2022 with 91530, and TEFAF Maastricht 2022 with galerie darmo & Gismondi.
aurèce vettier is a recipient of the 2020 Grand Prize (AI.ART Gallery Award, South Korea) and a finalist of the 2024 Lumen Prize.
About the Gallery
Located in Barcelona’s creative Poblenou district, the Load gallery is the latest arrival to the city art scene. Thanks to bespoke next-generation screens and an elaborate sound system, it brings digital art to life, showing the most ambitious artworks by internationally acclaimed artists. Load aims to redefine how media art and NFTs can be exhibited, distributed, and managed, as well as how they can be shown alongside physical art to create a coherent narrative.
Load is founded by Alex Simorrè — a tech entrepreneur, CEO and founder of Artbox, a company that has brought creative light, sound and LED solutions to the next level. With numerous bespoke projects under his belt, including the first in France curved LED screen 32×6 meters, over 5m pixels and entire LED-enhanced bowling, Alex brings over 19 years of deep experience and his precursor’s spirit to the art world through his latest initiative, the Load gallery.
Location:
C/ de Llull, 134, Sant Martí, 08005 Barcelona, Spain
Opening Days:
From September 19 till October 19, 2024, Thursday-Saturday
Opening Hours:
16.00-21.00
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