THE DEAD MAURIACS
La Suite Babel
Book & USB stick
(New Album, Moving Images, Still Images)
The pillars of the massive arcades stood on a cobbled pavement, dividing it into two sections of equal depth. The midday shadows stretched at right angles from the base of each pillar, forming a series of right-angled triangles; their tips marked the boundary of the façade, shielding it from the building’s light. The long perspective of the hotel was reminiscent of metaphysical Italy: a mineral-like structure with worn, thick pillars whose opalescent colour evoked the sheen and texture of soap—ochre and orange—against a backdrop of an emerald-green sky.
On the empty, quadrangular square, situated high above the estuary, the neoclassical statues, arranged in double rows, played chess with the electronic modules – cylinders, cones and truncated cones – as they rotated on their axes, whilst their cast shadows formed hypnotic, shifting patterns throughout the day.
Inside the hotel, the winter garden—a square conservatory with an English-style roof, filled with tropical plants—formed a sweltering, stifling, clammy antechamber, opening onto a staircase with crimson walls flocked with velvet, which led to the rotunda giving access to the first-floor rooms. Almost directly opposite the staircase, set back a few steps, lay the Babel Suite: a room of ambassadors and deceptions, of mirrors and apparitions, a room of voices and hallucinations.
The opulent and much-anticipated drawing room of the Suite opened through a double door onto another vast room with a high ceiling, at the centre of which stood a circular dissection amphitheatre—a replica of the old one, made of dark, polished wood. Its outer walls were pierced by tall, narrow rectangular windows, resembling arrow slits. In place of the dissection table, an octagonal arrangement of mirrors had been installed on a central platform. The walls of the room housing this amphitheatre were themselves panelled with imposing, silky panels with a slight iridescent sheen.
During meetings and conclaves, the dignitaries would take their seats and the amphitheatre’s mechanisms would spring into action, creating a diplomatic carousel. The dignitaries’ open mouths would then simultaneously emit still images, which the central mirror projected onto the panels through the slits. These images came to life for brief moments whilst ultra-high-frequency sounds resonated at very high intensity throughout the room. From this sonic suffocation, voices would then emerge—communications as if from the ether—which synchronised with the images. Occasionally, fragments of these images would be carried into other rooms of the hotel or out onto the square, for an infinitely brief moment, like flashes of lightning in a storm. They would then be projected onto half-open windows, onto a colonnade in the shadow of a corridor, onto statues, onto electronic modules, which retained a fragment of them like a scratch in the paint, a streak in the marble. For members of the intelligence services or for those with a penchant for curiosities, it was possible, with a keen eye, to count the number of meetings and identify elements of their content. Using soft brushes, one could remove the dust from these ghostly images, extract them from their media and, through various processes of extrapolation, restore the complete images, the sounds and sometimes even the smells carried by the medium.
