Tower of Babel

During the spring, summer and autumn of 2019, the Antwerp-based arts collective Rooftoptiger, united citizen initiatives, activists, artists, sans papiers and volunteers from the so-called Slaughterhouse Neighborhood and elsewhere by jointly building a high-rise bamboo tower. Based on a private owned wasteland which was temporarily made semi-public terrain, upon completion, the tower and it’s building site served as an infrastructure where people with various mother tongues could meet. It also became a place for the production of art, poetry, music, public debate and collective cooking. Lacking a common language, participants nevertheless understood each other “especially by the doing: by pointing, by demonstrating things, reading each other’s faces” (Otte & Gielen, 2020, p. 150). The case emerged from the grassroots but unfolded in conjunction with the organization ‘Antwerp Book City’ and with Antwerp’s ‘city poet’ Maud Vanhauwaert. Part of the project was her city poem translated back and forward from Dutch into eight other languages (English, Yiddish, French, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Turkish and Chinese).


More information about the Tower of Bable and the related project Radio Babel can be found here.

An article by Hanka Otte & Pascal Gielen in which they among other cases discuss the Tower of Bable can be found in this book ‘Cultural Policies in Europe: a Participatory Turn?, edited by Félix Dupin-Meynard and Emmanuel Négrier, published in 2020 by Éditions de l’Attribut, p. 141-154.

Photo: Rooftoptiger