The word Babel, after going through different linguistic routes, can be interpreted as “confusion”. I choose the biblical story that narrates the destruction of the Tower of Babel as  the birth of “the Other”, since when it was destroyed, the different languages ​​were created causing the inhabitants of Earth to need to “translate” their thoughts to be able to communicate with the others in order to  be able to live in the same territory.

The story says, that the men wanted with the tower to reach the sky, and thus, to be able to see the world from a divine perspective. To avoid this, God had to destroy this plan, and decided to  createdifferent languages. But what he actually did, as the writer Ruby Namdar points out, in one of his texts, was to destroy the magic creative virtue of the word, and not its descriptive capacity. The word was no longer enough to create light or life.

We are the artists, the writers and musicians, who look for the possibility of humanly, create, from what has already been created.

My work on Babel is a series that recreates that biblical moment that lead us to  many of the contemporary horrors, such as xenophobia, fear of the different and distance between each other in humanity. The myth of Babel is for me ,a metaphor of the contemporary time.

Mirta kupferminc