</odra> publishes the curators’ reflections on self-organization as a response to displacement and disconnection.

Reflecting on a self-organized exhibition Baby Alone in Babylone in Paris, they explore how temporary artistic collaboration can become a form of practical trust, generating spaces of belonging where stable structures no longer exist.

How do modes of closeness change if most of the time we live "through the interfaces of technology"? Can self-organization restore a sense of belonging where large institutions do not see us?

A year ago, in May 2025, these questions became the focus of the exhibition Baby Alone in Babylone, presented at Galerie Floréal Belleville in Paris by curators Alina Lutaeva, Anzhelika Urusova, and Yasya Minenkova. Thirteen artists* reflected on them through personal archives, ironic dystopias, and performative fortune-telling, where relocations turn into a cartography of relationships, and glitch becomes a way to remember.

The exhibition lasted two days. But as cultural researcher Lera Novitskaya, who followed the project from a distance, observed: "What occurred on a sensory level was elusive: it cannot be fixed, described, or held. But that is precisely its value." Some things, it turns out, don't need to be held to continue.

About how a sense of community is built "on the run," why error is sometimes more productive than the ideal, and how self-organization becomes "the art of practical trust" — the curators reflect, drawing on a conversation with Lera Novitskaya for Spectate.


Alina Lutaeva

The exhibition was called Baby Alone in Babylone, and on the gallery window we placed a large vinyl text: Not Alone Anymore. That’s how everything came full circle: we met at a moment when there is such an acute lack of spaces where people from different countries, contexts, and backgrounds can unite around something shared. An interesting paradox: we had a question, but no ready-made answer. When you yourself are inside these processes — relocation, loneliness, the construction of new identities — it’s impossible to fully reflect on them, because everything is constantly in motion.

Baby Alone in Babylone: a light, simple phrase that emerged out of something at times very complex in the applications and interpretations. But ultimately, everything came down to one thing — the desire for togetherness in this turbulent era we all find ourselves in.

Curatorially, we didn't aim to make a statement or provide answers — neither for the artists nor for the audience. We wanted new questions to emerge. Working on the exhibition together — the installation, the showings, the conversations that followed — reveals that something larger can grow from it: a kind of inquiry that begins in action and only later takes shape as reflection. A small reversal: collective artistic research born first in doing, and only afterward in thinking. Also, when you create something physically, together with someone else, it generates a new here-and-now experience, a shared one. You grow close to people and — which was embedded in the exhibition's theme as a problem — form new human connections, literally within the exhibition itself. It's a very warm social experience. And that experience you want to root in a new place, in a new location of your life.

In this sense, the glitch — emerging as an effect of broken communication — is not a breakdown; it could be a method. Error exposes the true nature of a process. In psychoanalysis, it's the slip of the tongue that opens access to the unconscious: Žižek wrote that a subject's failure to say what they meant can reveal a dimension of desire they hadn't been aware of before. Human and machine errors are alike: inevitable, and it's through them that something genuine surfaces. In an age of hyperproductivity and hyper-idealized systems, human error unexpectedly gains value. I think that's also fundamental when working with art. Let the gap exist. Let the process unfold on its own.

And this I understand more sharply now, a year later: having a tangible presence matters. The artistic work needs to physically exist, to breathe in a space, to encounter someone. The exhibition was an utterance that was launched. It seems these questions are still continuing. As Lera Novitskaya said in our conversation: "The reflection is like the tail of a comet, stretching behind this event. And it seems it will continue for some time, because the field of the project was inhabited by a multitude of meanings, ideas, and emotions."

This is also why the question of how we build collectivity in such conditions became central. With Baby Alone in Babylone, what mattered to us was not to impose a single interpretation or a curatorial “answer,” but to keep the field open and horizontal — both within our trio and in relation to the artists. We started our project with an open call, and thisl format was important precisely because it allowed the exhibition to be shaped from outside, through multiple perspectives that we could not fully anticipate. Our role was more about maintaining sensitivity and resonance between positions than about structuring a closed narrative.

At the same time, this instability can also be thought of in performative terms. The whole situation of working together in such compressed time (one month foe execution, two days pop-up exhibition) felt close to an “action” — almost a carnivalesque moment in the sense of Michael Bakhtin: a temporary suspension and reorganization of hierarchies, where roles shift and other relations become possible. For a short period, the exhibition space itself produces this inversion — a kind of short-lived redistribution of positions between artists, curators, and institutions, where the usual uncertainty (“am I visible enough, am I accepted, do I belong here?”) is temporarily replaced by the fact of already being in the space, already acting within it.

However, I am not interested in romanticizing error itself. It only exists in relation to rules and structures, and those structures are always provisional. What matters more to me is what becomes possible in those moments of instability when things do not fully align, but still continue to operate and produce meaning.