•Resonance of Ruin: Deconstructing Babel through Charcoal • Berlin 2020
Resonance of Ruin – Deconstructing Babel, 2023
Charcoal on paper
© K37 Studio, Berlin
Text by noT
Resonance of Ruin – Deconstructing Babel is not a retelling of the Tower of Babel. It is a way of living inside its remains.
The work begins with a myth that refuses to disappear. Babel keeps returning because it mirrors something deeply human: the desire to build higher, to organize the world, to reach beyond our limits, and to begin again after failure. This drawing is not simply about destruction. It is about what remains after collapse, and what we continue to carry forward.
At its center is a tower — unstable, layered, and assembled from fragments of different times. Part Roman ruin, part Bruegel fantasy, part unfinished thought, it feels as if it has been rebuilt many times and never completed. Each level rises, but each level also seems already damaged. The structure is climbing and falling at the same time.
This image continues a path that also appears in After Cana, where Veronese’s grand banquet is slowly overtaken by water. Here, the reference turns toward Bruegel’s Babel: cranes suspended in the air, bricks still wet, a monument in progress. But the tower has been pulled into the present. It feels salvaged from empires, modern ruins, failed ambitions, and broken projects reshaped into something that already understands its own impermanence.
Charcoal feels like the only honest medium for this. It allows construction and erasure to happen in the same gesture. The black carries weight; the greys breathe. Nothing is completely fixed. The tower itself feels soft and vulnerable, as if one touch could undo it. That fragility is part of the work. Grand structures, personal or collective, are often just dust holding form for a moment.
Beneath the tower, there is a thin layer of water. A few small boats drift across it, almost easy to miss. They are quiet and ordinary, but still moving. While the tower strains upward and breaks apart, the boats continue. That small persistence matters. Endurance not as glory, but as something modest and human.
Among the ruins, faint figures appear. They are barely there, absorbed into the dust and stone like memories. They do not dominate the image. They remain as traces of those who once built, dreamed, failed, and disappeared into the structure itself.
Resonance of Ruin is about cycles: building, collapse, and the quiet decision to continue. It lives in the fragile space between ruin and renewal — in the dust still floating, in the boats still gliding forward, and in the human need to try again even when failure is already part of the form.
nOT
The Little Tower of Babel (Rotterdam, c. 1563–1565) Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Smaller in scale, more intimate, but conceptually similar.
On the Myth of Babel
The myth of Babel has always felt close, not because it needs to be read literally, but because its structure keeps returning everywhere: in cities, in politics, in art, and in the fragile way people try to build something together.
It is never only a story about a tower. It is a story about ambition, language, cooperation, and collapse. A group of people share one language and one purpose. They begin to build upward, toward the sky, toward something larger than themselves. For a moment, everything seems possible.
Then meaning breaks.
Whether it is called God, fate, punishment, or entropy, something interrupts the common language. Words stop connecting people. Speech becomes noise. What once held the builders together begins to separate them, and the tower can no longer continue.
What remains most powerful in the myth is not only the collapse of the structure, but the collapse of understanding. The tragic moment is not simply that the tower falls, but that the people can no longer hear one another. The ruin begins in language before it becomes architecture.
That is why Babel still feels contemporary. We may no longer build towers in the same way, but the impulse remains: to create cities, systems, artworks, movements, relationships, and shared worlds that reach beyond the individual. Again and again, we try to construct something larger than ourselves. Again and again, communication fails, structures weaken, and what seemed solid becomes fragile.
For Resonance of Ruin – Deconstructing Babel, this myth becomes less a warning against ambition than a meditation on its vulnerability. Babel is not only about pride or punishment. It is about how difficult it is to build anything that endures when listening disappears.
And still, the myth does not end only in failure. After the fall, something remains: fragments, traces, gestures, scattered people, unfinished work, and the possibility of beginning again.
Maybe the most human part of Babel is not the tower.
It is what comes after.
nOT
The Great Tower of Babel (Vienna, 1563-Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Bruegel’s most famous and detailed version.