According to the Old Testament, The Tower of Babel was built by men to reach the sky. Certainly, you can find some of that in this replica made of books in the San Martín Square of Buenos Aires. Perhaps you won’t reach the sky, but the metaphor of elevating yourself through reading has been achieved. A work by the Argentine plastic artist Marta Minujin which is over 8 floors tall and it’s located just a few blocks away from our Hostel Colonial.
You can visit it since last Thursday, when the official opening took place and the artist stated: “I want to unify the world through books; I do not want a single language, but all the languages you can find”. The work consists of two large spirals 28 meters tall made of books in such different languages as: Swedish, Korean, Russian, Spanish, English, French, German, Arab and dozens of other languages coexisting in the tower.
The main objective of the work is to celebrate that Buenos Aires has been chosen World Book Capital 2011 by the UNESCO. The tower stands for pluralism and diversity of cultures, races and religions which characterizes our city. That’s why it has over 26.000 books donated by 52 different countries. There’s a tour round the tower, in small groups of 10 people, every day from 10AM to 10PM.
In the tour, you can walk through the books and to listen a recording repeating the word “book” in different languages. Once the tower is dismantled (on Saturday May 28th), the books will be catalogued and will become part of the first multilingual library of our city. An event you should not miss if visiting Buenos Aires in this time of the year, just steps away from our Hostel.
1 comment:
hello,
As I have read the blog above, I was really inspired with the historical views and the history itself how it was built.
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