Starting with the ideas of conquest, punishment, difference and dispersion as its primary meanings, the meaning of Babel has expanded through the different historical phases until reaching our contemporary times. This multiplication of meanings begins to become visible in parallel to the disintegration of the medieval theological world that had sustained its representation and meaning until the 16th century, to become a pictorial and literary object, transforming the tower of Genesis into a civil image, a permeable and undefined symbol of multiple identities.

From this moment on, Babel has served as a semantic framework for subsequent historical processes: from the exploration of the New World in the 16th century as the origin of global cartography, through thentechnological revolution of the 19th century, the commercial conquest of the sky in the 20th century, to the invasion of the virtual in life processes in the 21st. All these forms of reversing the imposed order have attacked the preconceived limits and the structures that sustained them. Today they confirm that all those spaces that had formerly been reserved for inexplicable phenomena or divinity have been invaded by human beings to the point of revealing their weaknesses and natural finitude.

In this prolonged diachrony, Babel remains a nuclear explanation for the why and how of the present day. Our current historical paradigm, which we call Globalization, has appeared as an attempt to twin the multiculturality that was mythologically born in Babylon. On the other hand, and as far as the visual formulation of the myth is concerned, the ubiquity and horizontal expansion of the virtual network has replaced the physical materiality of the tower and its aspiration and representation of the vertical axis.

However, Globalization as a process especially present in the western geography of the planet, which has built so many vertical, national, racial, identity and historical towers of Babel, has proved futile, with great weaknesses, gaps and limits in the face of the latest global vicissitude, a pandemic that has swept horizontally and without hierarchies. Globalization or New Babel is thus presented as a new historical order, which, we might think, has not yet been realized.

On this basis, the symposium aims to open a debate around various questions that will enable us to:

– re-conceptualize the ideas of social models, national identity, limits, transgressions?
– to think about current social dynamics and their translation into artistic practices
– relativize national approaches in favor of global cartographies
– decompose the hierarchical, chronological, or formal reading of history
– to expose examples of studies/practices based on the rhizomatic/cartographic model
– explore the potential of disorder and simultaneity as new methodologies
– reconsider cultural multiplication and difference as a valid social schema
– rethink the utopia/dystopia semantic arc today
– to hypothesize on Globalization as a real or transitional scenario
– to point out the value of the COVID-19 pandemic in the construction of a new social model
– to expose the evolutionary mismatch between technological development and policy management in our current scenario