A
Babel of Desire
A
Babel of Desire was the end "product" of a year long group
project entitled Immixtion-Sites of Engagement held at the artist-run
DAREdare Gallery in Montreal. A group of about 15 artists met
once a month to discuss issues centred around the "implication
of the artist in the community". The idea was for each of us to
choose a group in the community at large, interact with that group and
create a work with that group's participation.
The concept of community was left wide open and so I chose the on-line
telephone dating community. It struck me that this group of people,
of which I was a member at the time for obvious reasons, constituted
a community by any definition (see Community in panel 2 below). I thought
it constitued a very contemporary form of community mediated as it was
by technology and largely fragmented and individualized, as many communities
have become.
The result is the collection of four pages below which speak both to
the longings of the community involved and to some of the concepts and
attitudes informing the project. The work was later published in 2001
as a pull-out concrete poem in the Montreal literary magazine Matrix
for its 25th anniversary issue (58).