Double Major is all about connecting the dots. The presentation series, put on by Carleton University Art Gallery, invites speakers to talk on different points, then asks the audience to make the connections.
At the seventh and latest presentation on March 5, this was almost too easy.
So easy, in fact, that the speakers Catherine Khordoc and Thomas Grondin were animatedly sharing their ideas before the talks had even begun — something that caused gallery director Sandra Dyck to scold them good-naturedly.
“I know,” Khordoc said. “We’re cheating.”
At first glance, the topics seem wildly different: the tower of Babel in literature and The Gatineau Sessions of Performances in Intimacy. But the two speakers, and the audience, were able to quickly bring these subjects together. It was all about human communication.
Reported and produced by Emma Konrad
Khordoc, an associate professor of French at Carleton, talked about her encounters with the mythical tower of Babel in her research, and in modern life.
She drew on examples like folk-rock band Mumford and Sons’ grammy-winning album, Babel, and the 2006 Hollywood movie by the same name. In both, the idea of walls coming down and human beings finding a way of connecting is an important theme.
“It’s a desperate take on the walls that surround us,” Khordoc said. “It’s about our inability to communicate.”
Khordoc went on to speak about the tower’s mythical origins in the Old Testament. She said there was a heavy emphasis on the fact that the city of Babel shared a common speech.
In fact, many representations of the tower focus on this shared speech and the idea that mankind once shared a common language.
Which, Khordoc said, could help explain our renewed fascination with the Tower, and why it’s popping up in movie titles and album covers. She said Babel is often used to deal with questions of multiculturalism, interculturalism and immigration.
“Questions of identity, culture, and belonging are all present,” she said. “Babel touches on an element so fundamental to society: language.”
And the idea of communication and expression is where the second speaker, Grondin, found his similarity. He spoke about a project he started as an art history masters student at Carleton— Fait Maison— where he invited performance artists into his house to put on their pieces.
“What started as an idea grew into something that has now had over 35 performances,” he said.
Grondin said that Fait Maison was a way for him to unify the diversity of his life. It offered him a system of exchange – a way of communicating. And it brought together the new and the experienced, he said, so they could learn from eachother.
And so it seemed that communication was where Khordoc and Grondin found their common thread.
And it seems communicating doesn’t always entail making sense. Instead, it seems to be about connecting, and about the experiences.
“I wasn’t trying to make sense,” Grondin said. “I was trying to make it alive.”
