Babel Mallorca is a new concept of curatorial hubs. Located in the South East of the island of Mallorca, it is operating two spaces only a few kilometers apart from each other.
The first, S'Walden, an energy self-sufficient villa within the Mondragó Natural Park, is ideal for reflection and writing. The second, S'Cala, a building located in the heart of the preserved fishing village of Cala Figuera is dedicated to exhibitions, dialogue, and transmission to the younger generations through masterclasses and coaching.
Among our many projects scheduled or in development, we are happy to announce that the first to be launched this winter will be Refusés International, an annual prize and exhibition of photographs of 8 works of contemporary art that have been censored around the world in the past 24 months.
Between North and South, East and West, past and future, Babel Mallorca intends to be the embassy of a universe to be built, that of the "Tout-monde" dear to Édouard Glissant.
Arnaud Cohen
co-founder of Babel Mallorca
Drawing a new map
the inspiring vision of Simon Njami, writer, curator and the project sponsor.
Babel, as we uncover it, does not initially invite to meditation but to doubt; literally unquieteness. It is a dark, stark world, an after doomsday place in which we are left to ourselves and tormented by the essential question: what is our relationship to Creation. The journey has started. We are the ultimate witnesses, the only survivors of a world that no longer exists, in the tremor of a time that has stopped. Maps become useless; neither do compasses, nor memories. Both attracted and repulsed by this too silent space in which erratic shadows dance, this world that is imposing on us the rythm of our own hearts beats, we have, fleetingly, the vision of a fallen Eden, abandoned to itself. None of the old maps could be of any help . What is left to do? Building unspoken alliances, establishing a new map, with its borders and its gray areas, its havens of brotherhood within which we are reinventing new forms of communication despite the threatening plague and cholera outside. Africa, Europe, Asia, America don’t really matter anymore. The geographic specificities, as they disappear, offer us a metavision which itself transforms them into epiphenomena. We must create new harmonies, and this curse that the Almighty put on us to stop us from reaching the stars must be transformed into a unique opportunity to create the island Thomas More dreamed of, a utopia, that is to say, translated from the Greek, a non-place, that is to say, also, a place without overdetermination. We are here talking about heteropia and heterochrony, in other words, the gathering of the world into a forgotten polyphony. Heterotopia, as Michel Foucault developed it, focuses on the physical localisation of utopia within a given society. We shall now extend this notion to the whole planet experienced as a single, coherent entity. Among the principles set out by the philosopher, I will single out the one, which, within a heterotopia that would itself contain a heterochrony, or a break from real time, I will single out the one that is creating caesura within the same objective temporality and building multiple time-spaces. Just as libraries and museums, which, by their accumulation of objects and books of all times, form a “place of all times which itself is out of time”, for they claimed to be universal and eternal. There are also some other heterotopias, that, rather than being eternal, are recurring. Heterotopias that are, in other words, temporary: fairs or exhibitions, to name a few. Therefore we shall not work on heterotopia, which is contained in a given space. We will instead devote ourselves to the atopos, i.e. the object with no identified location. And heterology, which according to Michel de Certeau “is a discourse of the other, at the same time a discourse on the other and a discourse within which the other speaks". In that sense, it seems to me a more suited tool to reach our goal. Heterology is “an art of playing with two places”. It crafts a reversible scene where the last word does not necessarily belong to the primary subject of the discourse and where criticism does not spare the speaker, himself being hit by a ricochet. A place for experimentation, heterology bears the risk of a free speech and is a magnificent tool for trying to assess what in one place is missing in the other, as François Jullien stated.
Here is our Babel. And all it requires from us now is to be fed.