Babel
2021-2022. Ink, graphite on paper. 297 x 420 mm.
Just like its name, Babel is inspired by the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. As the tale goes, after the Great Flood, a united humanity – speaking the same language – arrives at Mesopotamia and decided to construct a city.
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And at its heart,
a tower so tall, it would touch the heavens.
Seeing this, God wound confound the population's language, rendering groups unable to communicate with one another and scattering them across the world. The tower, thus, was never finished.
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But what if it was?
I imagine its lowest floors would strongly embody Mesopotamian architectural styles, just like the tower's cultural origins.
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Mighty slopes, geometric angles, and detailed stone reliefs.
In due time, humanity would move into the visually majestic yet troubled Middle Ages. The tower's northern side, under instruction of the throne, would be a castle: complete with thick stone walls, watchtowers and defensive armaments, it housed the wealthy in lavish quarters.
Between the facilities of aristocrats and regional governments, the less fortunate – paid or forced to lay the tower's stone by hand – carved their own modest living spaces in the stone fortress.
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Cramped, moist and dark,
these caves formed the underbelly of medieval civilisation.
Then came the Enlightenment, with features fit for its pompous philosophies.
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The ubiquitous tall spires and tinted windows
were eager to sit themselves above the beige-gray foundations of the tower, something the Enlightenment's self-obsessed thinkers profusely rejected as unsightly: the artefacts of primitive, unsanitary societies.
And as the world industrialised, Babel's higher floors followed suit.
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Steam and electricity trailblazed a superior quality of life for the well-off: their quarters and offices extravagantly furnished, with tall windows overlooking the tower's grandiosity.
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The lower, working classes?
They populated low-ceiling attics and claustrophobic apartments that,
save for a few, were packed by the dozens like sardines along the tower's inner face, never hoping to see the sun.
Oh, and airships, probably.
At some point, society adopts them as its primary mode of commute around the tower's many meandering districts, thanks to the life's work of one enigmatic, genius inventor.
Soon enough, I suppose, we'd arrive at modern day. And as goes for every other of humanity's ambitions, we declare that the tower of Babel is tall, but not tall enough. And so, higher and higher we build.
Hyper-productive, opulent, uniform, functional.
Our sterile, angular skyscrapers are but the physical reflection of our values, as the latest generation to inherit Babel.
To me, the tower would be humanity's living, breathing timeline.
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The lower floors, while ancient and rudimentary in their facilities, would be far too rich in historical value to tolerate any renovation. Albeit begrudgingly, the higher floors have to simply live with that: like inheriting heirlooms from a bygone era.
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The result? A melange of facades across time that, to us, have no place stacked on top of one another.
But the tower of Babel owns every bit of its hodgepodge, chaotic appearance, as should its inhabitants.
Our history has been – and still is – intricate, tumultuous, confusing.
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But as long as we come together, despite differences in culture and tongue, as did Babel's founding peoples,
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