Babel at the Tate Modern

In the summer I visited the Tate Modern, London and saw ‘Babel’ by Cildo Meireles. His installation creates a critical mass of vintage radios standing at over 4 metres tall; towering over the individual.

The circular tower is made of hundreds of second-hand radios that Meireles collected over a period of 11 years. Meireles had the first idea for the piece in 1990 in New York on Canal Street. Meireles had the idea ‘upon observing the quantity and diversity of radios and all the different types of sound objects that were sold around Canal Street’. Miereles has said that ‘Radios are interesting because they are physically similar and at the same time each radio is unique’. It wasn’t until he was Helsinki in 2001 that Meireles finally finished the installation where it was subsequently displayed at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art.

Cildo Meireles is a Rio De Janeiro-born Brazilian contemporary and conceptual artist. Born in 1948 Meireles started his art career in 1963 when he studied at the District Federal Cultural Foundation in Brasilia.

Meireles is best known for his installations which often create a phenomenological experience through viewer interaction.

Many of Meireles works’ have been used to express resistance to political oppression in Brazil.

Meireles refers to Babel as a ‘tower of incomprehension’. Each analogue radio is tuned into a different station, adjusted to the minimum audible volume. The result is a hum of indistinguishable voices, noises and music. The radios compete with each other to create a continuous stream of sound.

The tower has been linked to the ‘biblical story of a tower tall enough to reach the heavens, which, offending God, caused him to make the builders speak in different tongues’.

Babel is placed in a blue-lit room to add to the eerie nature of Meireles piece and enhancing the phenomenological experience of the installation. Larger radios, that are almost furniture in their own right, have been placed at the bottom of the tower. As you progress up the tower the radios get smaller. This was a deliberate decision by Meireles to create the illusion of the perspectival foreshortening.

The curator and writer Moacir dos Anjos suggests that the presentation of informational overload in Babel can be seen as a metaphor ‘for the intricate relations between distinct nations and communities’ which insists on ‘recognising the existence of a territory with uncertain boundaries, one that accommodates multiple oppositions and produces the multiple contamination of cultural expressions previously separated by geographical and historical injunctions’