Direction: Anna Maria Guasch (UB) Co-direction: Modesta Di Paola, Julia Ramírez Blanco Coordination: María Bendito Organized by: R+D Excelency Project Critical Cartography of Art and Visuality in the Global Age. Third Part (I+D MICINN: HAR2013-43122P). Spanish Ministry of Economy and Productivity/ Research Group GRC: Art, Globalization, Interculturality (SGR 2017 SGR 577). Government of Catalunya. Departament d’ Empresa i Coneixement. Collaborating Entities: Geography and History Faculty, Art History Department, University of Barcelona. Excellency R+D Project ACAF/ART IV Critical Cartographies, Analytic and Selective of the Artistic and Monumental Environment of the Mediterranean Era in the Modern Age (I+D MICINN: HAR2015-66579-P). Spanish Ministry of Economy and Productivity/ Research Group GRC: Grup d’ Estudis d’ Art Modern a l’ Àrea Mediterrània ACAF/ART GEAM (2017 SGR 462). Government of Catalunya. Departament d’ Empresa i Coneixement.
Babel with its tower, in its truncated ascension without limits, assumed the vertigo of imposed, translatable linguistic identities, the vertigo of the impossible rebellion of the inextensible against the absolute, of the finite versus the infinite. Thought and its expression got trapped in the ruins of the dense walls erected by the mediate power in its eagerness to reach the fullness of the whole, which was none other than that of the omnipotent Other. The emulation, the conquest and the overflow of power by power, the dominion of the possible or the thinkable reality by the existing reality, accompanied the slow and complex wandering, individual and collective of the human being. With their physical or symbolic verticals, Babel’s ambitions and revolutions continually and unsuccessfully challenged history. The technology of the global, the World Wide Web and hyperconnectivity have buried the last exhalations of the resounding demolition of Babel, the homologous has critically eroded the identitarian elements and flatness has done the same with the ascension. The towers of Babel now are only simulacra like the giraffe is to the spider.