The Tower is an interactive video installation that explores the fragile relationship between communication, memory, and collective experience. Inspired by the biblical story of the Tower of Babel and informed by contemporary realities of conflict, migration, and cultural fragmentation, the work examines how language can simultaneously connect and divide human communities.
The installation is built around a simple homemade bread recipe inherited through generations of women in the artist's family. Bread functions as a universal symbol of nourishment, labor, hospitality, and cultural continuity. Although recipes vary across cultures, the act of making bread remains a shared human practice that transcends national, linguistic, and religious boundaries.
Projected across a three-panel screen, the work combines prerecorded video, live performance, and public participation. In the prerecorded footage, the artist sits in a red chair reading her grandmother's bread recipe from her mother's cookbook. Alongside this recorded image, a live video feed places the artist within the projection in real time, creating a dialogue between past and present, memory and lived experience.
The installation extends beyond the artist's personal narrative through audience participation. Passersby are invited to sit in a red chair identical to the one depicted in the video and read a bread recipe in their own language. Their image intermittently replaces the artist's live presence on the screen, transforming viewers into participants and contributors. As different individuals enter the work, the installation becomes a temporary site of exchange where multiple voices, cultures, and histories coexist.
The soundtrack consists of women reading bread recipes in various languages. These recordings are spatially layered and manipulated, allowing individual voices to emerge, overlap, and recede. At times a single language dominates; at others, the voices merge into a dense and incomprehensible chorus. The resulting soundscape evokes both the possibility and the limits of communication.
Rather than presenting a fixed narrative or political statement, The Tower creates a space of encounter. The work proposes bread, storytelling, and participation as shared cultural practices while acknowledging the linguistic and social divisions that shape contemporary life. Through the accumulation of voices and the continual exchange between artist and audience, the installation becomes a living structure—an unfinished tower built not from bricks, but from language, memory, and human presence.
