Babel is a visual meditation on the use of photography through two of the most significant examples in today’s capitalistic society: billboard advertising (photographs of adverts on the walls of the Paris underground) and images taken directly from Daesh propaganda magazines*. The project aims at combining two contrasting and apparently antithetic messages. It attempts to portray the war which is currently being fought – by unprecedented means, in unprecedented fields – between a Western civilization, that is suffering from a loss of identity and an self-declared Caliphate, which proposes a whole array of radical moral values, distorting one of the world’s most widespread religions.
Are we neutral spectators or oblivious hostages
Babel was born from this question. From the impression that we are all like coloured pieces of chalk, writing a story we are not conscious of. Powerless individuals and witnesses living through an epochal change, despite ourselves.
The result is a work of digital manipulation. Michela Battaglia (1982) and Stefano De Luigi (1964) started from a homage to the Italian artist Mimmo Rotella and chose a white square as a their common ground. On this new level, their two different generations and visual cultures met, and the layering of advertising pictures and propaganda photos gave birth to an unprecedented set of images, that invites us to stop and think.
In 2003, Susan Sontag wrote that: “shock has become a leading stimulus of consumption and source of value.”** Since then, the tolerance threshold has continued to rise.
On one hand, we have become insensitive to, if not greedy for, a certain level of pornography of pain; a debasing representation of women; the lust for power, wealth and productivity: the only sound values on which, apparently, a life worth living should be built.
On the other hand there’s a promise of a sense of belonging, of redemption from solitude, anonymity and social exclusion.
In both cases, there are only appearances, degenerations.
Babel portrays our unconscious daily life, exposed to the constant abuse from a rainstorm of images that we cannot escape, from which there is no shelter.
We might as well stop running and open our eyes without fear.
* Online magazines with propaganda and recruitment purposes: Dabiq (15 issues 2014-2016 published in Arabic, English, German, French), Dar al-Islam (10 issues 2014-2016 published in French) and Rumiyah (13 issues 2016-2017 published in Arabic, English, German, French, Indonesian and Turkish).
** Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, Picador, NY 2003, p 23.