Babel
An exploration of the linguistic knot we call human. A journey along public bookcases, unfolding through conversations on multilingualism, untranslatable feelings, and the fragile, persistent threads that bind us across languages.
Photographs and audio stories
Exhibitions: OBA Amsterdam, Huis van alle Talen, Hard//Hoofd magazine, Dag van de Europese Taal, EUNIC. Leporello Booklet, distributed in public bookcases around the Netherlands and Belgium.
The small public bookcases cling to facades, tucked between bicycles or half-hidden behind planters. Locals pause to exchange books, to browse these quiet paper landscapes. One man tells us he encounters a mosaic of languages on their shelves—Dutch, Russian, English, Chinese, Turkish—as if the whole world briefly gathers inside these modest, self-built libraries.
Every major city resembles a modern Tower of Babel. Places like Amsterdam and Antwerp hold more than 170 languages within their streets. The biblical story casts multilingualism as a kind of punishment, yet the parable is often misread. The building of the tower did not simply end in confusion; the act of building—of stacking stone upon stone—was itself a moment of connection, a collective reaching.
Moving from one bookcase to the next, it brings together fragments of conversation about language, belonging, and feelings that resist translation—revealing how, even in difference, we continue to find ways to understand one another.
Supported by Amarte Fonds. Thanks to SonoDocs
Thanks to Maud Vanhauwaert en de Toren van Babel in Antwerpen.
Music Blue Dot Sessions (Free Music Archive / NonCommercial License)