The drawings by Mariana Castillo Deball show the tower in various stages of building and collapse. In one drawing, a woman is holding the design of the tower, while another portrays a community of builders having set up camp in the vicinity of the tower that is under construction. Another drawing shows Babel in ruins. Deball includes other pictorial elements, such as ethnographic objects from the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, including clay figurines made by the Karajá Indigenous people from Central Brazil, as well as petecas (old shuttlecock-like objects made from straw and feathers for a game similar to present-day badminton).⁵ These motifs, which have trickled in from other projects the artist worked on simultaneously – just like Babel, as a story, a building, and a ruin – are of ongoing interest to her.  

Having transformed these drawings into linocuts, Castillo Deball printed them on paper made by Gangolf Ulbricht, a collaborator with whom she has worked before. From these prints, which she destroyed and tore into snippets of different sizes, she created new sheets of paper in three different colors: grapefruit pink, pistachio green, and chocolate brown. These 56 x 76 cm paper sheets are reminiscent of an archaeological excavation site, with shards of pottery captured in the soil, frozen in time. While some of these papers are kept in this state, others serve as surface and background for a new round of prints, so that the linocut drawings begin to repeat themselves through different layers. 

A story progresses through its twists of plot and the passage of time. This also reflects how our relationship with things, human-made things, intensifies over time. Multiple readings are possible as the object is perceived through different eyes; it no longer speaks for itself. More than presenting a single image that emerges from a process, the works featured in this exhibition reveal the ongoing process of the artist at work, the practice of telling through matter and time – story upon story in an ongoing construction aspiring towards perfection but leaving behind fragments in its wake.   

— Moosje M Goosen

[1] See for instance: Jean Benet, The Construction of the Tower of Babel. Translated by Adrian Nathan West. Wakefield Press, 2017. 

2 For more information about the reception of the Babel myth in Arabic cultures and language, see: Abdelfatah Kilito, The Tongue of Adam. Translated by Robyn Creswell. New Directions, New York: 2016.

3 In: Jacques Derrida, Des Tours de Babel, translated by Joseph F. Graham. In: Graham ed., Difference in Translation. Cornell University Press, 1985. 

4 Mariana Castillo Deball, About the Book’s Grid in: Ixiptla, Spring 2023, Vol. V, Amarantus. Bom Dia Boa Tarde Boa Noite, Berlin 2023. pp.7-19.

5 On September 2, 2018, there was a fire at the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro which burned down its entire collection. This is the subject of Castillo Deball’s exhibition at Pivô in São Paulo, A Noite, which opened in September 2023, on the same date as the fire.