The Museum of Babel
The Museum of Babel
Performance by Shyamar Iyer & Alyssa Chetrick in collaboration with Juliana Morales Carreno
April 12 & 13, 8 pm
Free and Open to all
“When it was announced that the Library contained all books, the first reaction was unbounded joy. All men felt themselves the possessors of an intact and secret treasure.”- Jorge Louis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel envisions an infinite repository of all possible books, where lone inquisitors (librarians) wander hexagonal chambers, searching for meaning in an ocean of words and orthographic symbols. In their futile quest for order, and overwhelmed by the endless permutations of knowledge, they descend into madness—“confound and confuse all things, like some mad and hallucinating deity.”
The Museum of Babel is a reimagining of Borges’ labyrinthine vision, where the Ely Center of Contemporary Art transforms into his library. Narrator and movement artist Shayama Iyer and violinist Alyssa Chetrick become the inquisitors—figures in an endless, circular journey toward an unattainable truth.
The performance draws a parallel between Borges’ library and the digital abyss of the internet: an infinite archive where knowledge, misinformation, and surveillance intertsect. The lone librarian mirrors the modern researcher, navigating a vast and shifting epistemological landscape, often under the watchful eye of unseen forces.
As institutions of science and evidence-based knowledge are increasingly defunded, the very foundations of dialectical growth and objective truth stand at risk. Without the scaffolding of peer-reviewed research, freedom of language, and rigorous inquiry, we risk becoming lost in an endless hall of mirrors, unable to distinguish insight from noise.
Through movement and sound, The Museum of Babel explores the struggle to find clarity in an overwhelming and fragmented reality—where the search for meaning is a Sisyphean act. Meaning is not found in solitude but rather from collective dialogue. By resisting the forces that seek to surpress the spaces of dialect, we find our way through the library—not alone, but with each other.