If words are everywhere, why shouldn't they also embellish the urban space? Why is it that the words we see on the streets are only those of signs defining permissions or prohibitions, those of neon lights identifying stores and services, those of construction permits and posters trying to sell us something? Why is it that the most beautiful words we see outside are only short verses or social intervention slogans written in fear on unauthorized walls? Why is it that, with the exception of the current trend of presenting the names of cities in tridimensional aluminum letters, the pubic space doesn’t also show words that allow us to relax, learn and evolve?

​

These are issues we had been struggling with for a long time and, when Imaginarius launched its usual call for artistic creations in 2019, the festival's choice of “The Myth” as its main theme seemed like fate: the Tower of Babel had been the first attempt at explaining the origin of the different languages ​​in the world and it also became an opportunity for us to pay attention to Words as an artistic material that does not have to be confined only to books, lyrics and identical forms of essentially private enjoyment.

 

The legend first appeared in the Book of Genesis and started with something like this: after the Great Flood, when all the population of the world still spoke the same language, the peoples of Babylonia came together to build a tower-city which, rising to unprecedented heights, would allow its inhabitants to escape new risings of water. The undertaking turned out so well that God considered it an attack on his omnipotence and, to frustrate such presumptuous blasphemy, He then created a set of different languages, so that the builders could no longer understand each other and the project would fail.

 

The Tower of Babel remained unfinished, people kept living without ever being able to immediately understand – or accept – the strangers they encountered and only with the evolution of societies and education did we find (time-consuming and laborious) solutions to get around the continuous obstacle that is presented by a different language. It’s true that classes, dictionaries and books helped, and that social interaction always ensured a gradual understanding between speakers of different idioms. But never before as in the transition from the 20th to the 21st century – with the arrival of the internet, mobile phones, websites and apps that replace old encyclopedias with polyglot translators within the reach of just a few taps or vocalizations – was it so evident that the Tower of Babel has been reduced to its remains, practically incinerated. When a Syrian, a Chinese and a Portuguese enter a bar, today they can all chat in different languages ​​if they have internet access to Google Translator.

 

The best way to demonstrate how God didn’t foresee everything – or how He also had to adapt – was to reflect on the case of Santa Maria da Feira: the official data indicated that in 2019 almost 1,400 citizens of over 60 nationalities lived in this municipality. Leaving aside strict criteria because the objective of our work wasn’t journalistic and much less statistical, we chose some of these countries for a first contact, according to a selection that privileged the number of their representativeness in the territory, the difficulties of their linguistic adaptation and even the exoticism of its origins. Among the immigrants who were available to tell us their stories, we chose 11 families and they were the ones who gave us the words that materialized into this project. As for covid-19, we chose not to give it more airtime; it was enough that the pandemic subjected us to the cancellation of Imaginarius 2020 and to frustrating restrictions even in 2021, with its imposition of controlled circuits and minimal audience capacities

 

Even before the pandemic, however, “The Remains of Babel’s Tower” already intended to combine the in-person and online formats, in Portuguese and English. Among the trees of Quinta do Castelo, the public gets to see the most aesthetic version of the project: a word in the native language of each immigrant who joined us in this discovery (an incentive for mutual learning requiring so little effort on our part when they are still trying to learn the whole of the European Portuguese); a short text about the history of these families (with literary liberties such as irony and double meaning, in a pedagogical attempt to encourage the public to never just stick to the titles or to excerpts taken out of the global context of the message); and an indication redirecting to the project's website (where the contents are clarified and developed). On the website, we then reveal the personal stories that justify the special meaning of these words in the lives of their protagonists, with the degree of detail allowed by each person's experience, modesty or shyness. The photographs portray their daily lives, show contrasts that persist despite acculturation, expose similarities that remain in spite of the latitude changes. The texts have their own meaning and also exhibit scattered underlinings that, more than highlighting details of the base-narrative, provide autonomous readings for words and expressions with particular imaginal power.

​

If words are everywhere, Language is part of everything – part, at least, of the conception that we make of everything presented to us. We can even communicate without verbal or sign language, but what we get out of those interactions only exists when it becomes thought – and the fact is that we don't think without words. What they demonstrate in this project, therefore, is that, regardless of any geographical, cultural or linguistic specificities, the most valuable resource for integration – for the fluid dialogue that God didn’t want in Babel – is knowing the Other. When in good faith, words reveal, words explain, words bring together, help, inspire… With “The Remains of Babel’s Tower”, we got to know these others, we let them get to know us, we marveled at the discovery and we’re grateful for that. We couldn't have done it without words. ■

​