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Pace: Performance + Algorithmic Motion

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This video work is the second of two that comprise Pace, Ana María Caballero's multichannel installation, which also includes a unique generative still. In Pace’s first video work, Caballero pays homage to Pipilotti Rist’s Ever Is Over All and proposes an evolution in personal empowerment. Whereas Rist’s protagonist symbolically takes down failed systems, Caballero’s main character practices radical repair. Pace posits that private joy is as powerful a form of resistance as destruction. Caballero stars in her own film, performing gleeful movements rooted in Latin American salsa music, which she grew up dancing and accesses as a source of resilience. As she advances, urban wreckage repairs. By contrast, in Rist’s work a woman smashes car windows with a flower as she walks down a street, an exuberant smile on her face, similar to the smile she’s given by a passing policewoman, who presumably approves of the destruction. Madrid’s Calle del Barquillo is recreated through AI because a pharmacy that bore her father’s name, F. Caballero, existed there. Caballero pilgrimed here daily as she mourned her father’s death, finding solace in its presence. The works are connected through the protagonists’ outward and exaggerated expressions of self-possessed joy and their public (and thus out-of-place) physicality. Both works are also linked through the protagonists’ red shoes, signaling confidence in the trodden path. Pace is the first film from Caballero’s ongoing Literal Litoral series of choreographic explorations that combines her live, performed poetry with cinematic AI. This second video consists of coded visuals, the result of a custom algorithm that reads Caballero’s body-in-motion and translates it into graphic marks, probing the connection between embodied experience and our attempts to record it. We often believe we need to venture outwards to connect with nature. But our bodies themselves are nature. Rist’s video pairs gleeful destruction with out-of-focus flowering scenes. Caballero pairs radical repair with the body-as-sign, proposing closer relationships with ourselves as a first approach to systemic transformation. Custom algorithm by Cameron Nelson. anamariacaballero.com

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