ResonanceOfRuin

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

Text by NOt

Resonance of Ruin – Deconstructing Babel is my way of living inside the story of the Tower of Babel rather than retelling it. I’m drawn to myths that refuse to die, that keep returning because they mirror us so closely — our ambitions, our mistakes, our endless urge to build again. This isn’t a piece about destruction; it’s about what lingers when everything else collapses. About what we still carry forward.

At its core, the work is a tower — unstable, stitched together from fragments of different eras. It’s part Roman ruin, part Bruegel fantasy, part unfinished thought. A structure that seems rebuilt countless times, never quite complete. Each layer reaches higher, but it’s already falling apart as it rises. For me, it’s the image of persistence: the human need to try again, even when we know it might fail.

I’ve been here before. In After Cana, I let Veronese’s grand banquet quietly flood — turning celebration into uncertainty. Here, I return to Bruegel’s Babel: cranes frozen midair, bricks still wet, a monument in progress. But I’ve pulled it into our present. My tower feels salvaged — made of empires, of modern ruins, of broken ambitions reshaped into something that already understands its own impermanence.

Charcoal feels like the only honest medium for that. It lets me build and erase in the same movement. The black carries weight; the greys breathe. Nothing is fixed. The tower itself feels soft, vulnerable — as if one touch could undo it. That fragility is part of the idea. Grand projects, personal or collective, are often just dust that manages to hold form for a moment.

Beneath all that, there’s a thin layer of water. A few small boats drift across it — easy to miss at first. They’re quiet, ordinary, but still moving. While the tower strains upward and breaks apart, the boats keep going. That small persistence matters to me. Endurance not as glory, but as something modest and human.

Among the ruins, faint figures appear — barely there. They’re woven into the dust and stone like memories. I didn’t want them to stand out, just to exist — the presence of those who once built, dreamed, failed. They belong to the work the way ghosts belong to a place.

Resonance of Ruin is about cycles — building, collapsing, rebuilding. It’s about what remains after the noise: gestures, traces, movement. Not monuments, but persistence. It lives in that fragile space between ruin and renewal — in the dust still floating, in the boats still gliding forward, in the quiet decision to keep trying anyway.

On the Myth of Babel

The myth of Babel has always felt close to me. Not because I take it literally, but because I see echoes of it everywhere — in cities, in politics, in art, in the way conversations unravel when meaning slips away. It’s never just about a tower. It’s about what happens when people try to build something together — and what fractures when they stop understanding one another.

In the story, everyone speaks the same language. They build a tower that rises toward the sky. Everything goes well — maybe too well — until something shifts. Call it God, fate, or simply entropy. Suddenly, words fail. The language that held them together falls apart, and with it, the tower itself.

What stays with me isn’t the collapse of the structure, but the collapse of connection. The moment when speech turns into noise — when everyone talks, but no one is heard. That silence, or that confusion, feels more tragic than the ruins.

And yet, there’s something deeply human in that failure. This pattern we repeat: building, losing touch, drifting apart, trying again. Maybe we no longer build towers, but we still reach upward — through art, cities, movements, music, love. The impulse remains the same: to create something larger than ourselves, even if it doesn’t last.

For me, Babel isn’t a warning against ambition; it’s a reminder of fragility. How easily understanding slips away. How hard it is to build anything that endures when we stop listening. And how, despite all that, we keep going.

Maybe the most human part of the myth isn’t the fall — it’s what comes after.

NOt