We compose our self a Tower of Babel, or perhaps an airy panopticon—a structure where imagined primordial inhabitants gather beneath a digital vault, almost like a sky, even though it was meant to be nothing more than a simple landscape. Or is it a dusty cabinet of curiosities, where murmuring, humming creatures hide behind semi-transparent tapestries, rhythmically and obsessively repeating their eternal rituals?
BABEL is a performance installation revolving around the more or less faltering round dance of words, set against the backdrop of a more or less self-imposed surveillance of everything and everyone. Drawing on myths regarding the origins of language (such as the Tower of Babel), we grope for words that turn into sentences—only to collapse and vanish, then re-emerge time and again as blurred reflections of ourselves and the landscape we inhabit: an eternally pulsating organism born of a mental realm never intended to be artificial. We are held captive by language, and yet never freer than precisely there.
«I'm all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling, no sky for their dispersing, coming together to say, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, those that merge, those that part, those that never meet, and nothing else, yes, something else, that I'm something quite different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing in an empty place…»
With this, Happy Gorilla DC celebrates 15 years as a performing company. The participants this time are Susanne Irene Fjørtoft, Kjartan Andersen, Costin Chioreanu, Mirte Bogaert, Roar Sletteland, Lars Ove Toft, and Thomas Bruvik.
The production is supported by the Arts Council Norway. Thanks to Wrap and BEK for excellent studio residencies, and—not least—thanks to Gyldenpris Kunsthall for providing the space to realize BABEL. Thanks also to everyone who sent us voice recordings, and to everyone else who assisted in various ways.
