Art Brussels

Friday 24 April
1 – 1:50 PM at the Tribune

A performative conversation with Ana María Caballero (artist, OFFICE IMPART), moderated by Melissa Giardina.

Ana María Caballero is a poet and multidisciplinary artist who reimagines poetry and the book for contemporary and digital worlds. In conversation with Melissa Giardina, she’ll speak about how language can expand into visual, spatial, and sensory experiences, performing a trilingual reading with a participatory audience moment.

About the Speakers:   

Ana María Caballero
Ana María Caballero is an award-winning Colombian-American poet and multidisciplinary artist whose work explores embodiment, memory, care and the cultural ethics of emerging technologies, while reimagining poetry and the book for contemporary and digital worlds. Working across poetry, performance, moving image and generative systems, she develops digital poetics grounded in what she terms analog generativity: a practice that treats readership and the body as legitimate inputs into computational systems.
Her work interrogates how biology shapes cultural rites and questions gendered notions of sacrifice and virtue, foregrounding physicality, voice, and vulnerability as legitimate inputs into computational systems. Across media, her practice centers slowness, intimacy and care as aesthetic and ethical principles. 
A leading figure in contemporary poetics, Caballero is the first living poet to sell a poem via Sotheby’s and a quintuple Lumen Prize finalist and winner. Her work has been recognized with the MAXXI Bvlgari Award, a Sevens Foundation grant and a Knight Foundation Art + Tech Fellowship nomination.
Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Victoria & Albert Museum (London), HEK Basel, the Carmen Thyssen Museum (Málaga), the Francisco Carolinum Museum (Linz), the Wroclaw Contemporary Museum, the Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia (Bogotá), Times Square, Sotheby’s and the New World Center (Miami). Her work is held in public collections such as the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, MACBA Barcelona, Fundación March, the Ashmolean Museum, the Francisco Carolinum Museum, HEK Basel and MAD Arts Museum. Private collectors that hold her work include the Arab Bank of Switzerland, Spalter Digital, the Stahlberg Collection, ADAC Foundation and Le Random. 

Melissa Giardina
Melissa Giardina is the face of Vindetta!, the company she founded in 2020 to unite everything she loves: hosting and chairing in-depth literary interviews with writers and artists, and leading panel discussions. She holds a Master’s degree in English/Italian Translation and has a soft spot for photography, scubadiving and film—but above all, she is a shamelessly voracious reader, always chasing beauty and wonder in language and story.
She has a mild (read: persistent) obsession with Sylvia Plath, Hugo Claus and Peter Verhelst, and a particular love for the short story.
Melissa spent many years as a bookseller, including at Paard Van Troje in Ghent, and served as an ambassador for the Leesfonds at the Royal Academy for Dutch Language and Literature. She is a regular panelist on Uitgelezen, the live literary programme at Vooruit, and serves on several literary juries, including De Bronzen Uil and the Ultima for Literature. She is on the board of the Arkcomité voor het Vrije Woord. With Sicilian roots and Brussels in her bones, she now lives, works, and—most importantly—reads in Ghent.