ResonanceOfRuin

Jorge da Cruz (b. 1974)
Resonance of Ruin – Deconstructing Babel, 2023
Charcoal on paper
© k37 studio, Berlin

Resonance of Ruin
Text by Jorge da Cruz

Resonance of Ruin – Deconstructing Babel is my way of sitting with the myth of the Tower of Babel—not to retell it, but to spend time inside it. I’ve always been drawn to these stories that keep coming back, especially when they echo so much of what we still live with: ambition, failure, repetition. This isn’t a story about collapse, really—it’s about what stays after. What we carry, even when things fall apart.

At the center of the work is this tower—unsteady, patched together from different times and places. A bit Roman, a bit Bruegel, a bit like something unfinished in your head. The kind of structure that looks like it’s been rebuilt over and over again, never quite getting there. Every tier reaches upward, but it’s already crumbling as it climbs. For me, it’s like watching effort repeat itself. Trying again. Failing again. Still trying.

I’ve been here before, in a way. In After Cana, I took Veronese’s feast and let it quietly flood—turning something grand into something uncertain. This time, I’ve gone back to Bruegel’s Babel, with its cranes mid-air and bricks still wet, but I’ve pulled it into now. The tower I drew feels like it’s made from salvaged parts—bits of empire, scraps of concrete, old ambitions reassembled into a new shape that already knows it won’t last.

Charcoal is the right language for this. It lets me build and erase in the same breath. The blacks hold weight; the greys fade into air. Nothing is fixed. I like that. The tower doesn’t feel solid—it’s soft, fragile, almost unsure of itself. Every line could be rubbed away with a sleeve. That’s part of the point. Grand ideas are often just dust held together for a little while.

Beneath all that weight, there’s a thin layer of water, and a few tiny boats moving through it. You might miss them at first. They’re small, quiet, kind of ordinary—but they’re still moving. Still there. While the tower pushes upward and breaks apart, the boats keep going. That matters to me. It says something about endurance—not as something heroic, but as something simple and persistent.

And then there are these faint figures—not quite there, not fully gone either. They’re woven into the ruins. Not meant to be seen clearly. They’re like memories, or traces of people who tried, built, dreamed. I didn’t want them to take over the image. I just wanted them to be part of it. Part of the layers. Part of the history that doesn’t get written down.

This work is about cycles. About building, failing, and trying again. About what survives—not monuments, but gestures. Traces. Movements that keep going even when the big things fall. Resonance of Ruin is that space in between—the dust still in the air, the boats still gliding across the water, and the quiet insistence to keep going anyway. JC

On the Myth of Babel Text by Jorge da Cruz

The myth of Babel has always felt familiar to me. Not because I believe in the story literally, but because I see it everywhere—in cities, in politics, in art, in conversations that fall apart halfway through. It’s not just about a tower. It’s about what happens when people try to build something big together—and what breaks when they stop understanding each other.

In the story, they speak one language. They build a tower that reaches the sky. It’s going well, too well. Then something shifts—God, fate, entropy, whatever you want to call it—and suddenly they can’t understand each other anymore. The words stop working. The whole thing collapses.

That moment—the loss of shared language—feels more tragic than the fall of the tower itself. It’s not the rubble that stays with me, it’s the silence. Or worse, the noise of everyone speaking at once and no one being heard.

But there’s also something strangely human about it. This pattern. We build, we disconnect, we drift apart. Then we try again. Maybe not with towers. Maybe with music, or cities, or stories, or protest, or love. The impulse is still there—to reach for something bigger than ourselves, even if it doesn't hold.

What I take from Babel isn’t a warning against ambition. It’s a recognition of fragility. How easily meaning can slip through our hands. How hard it is to build anything that lasts when we’re not listening. And how even then, we don’t stop trying.

Maybe that’s the most human part of the myth—not the fall, but what comes after. JC