Many contemporary artists who have emigrated from their home countries struggle with loneliness and the difficulties of integrating into new communities. With these challenges in mind, curators Alina Lutaeva, Anzhelika Urusova, and Yasya Minenkova decided to organize their own exhibition in Paris, a city with strong institutional hierarchy, where many émigré artists feel left out.

For me, after relocation there was a very strong feeling that professional identity and cultural belonging exist in a kind of parallel layer, especially in a city like Paris, where the art world seems to operate alongside institutions rather than fully inside them. In that situation, agency is not something taken for granted; it only appears through manifestation: through making work visible, through concrete projects that allow your presence to be acknowledged and discussed. This visibility, even if temporary, becomes a way to restore a sense of belonging in a new cultural and professional environment.

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 it open and horizontal — both within our trio and in regards to the artists.

At the same time, this instability can also be viewed in performative terms. The whole situation of working together under tight deadlines (one month for execution and a two-day 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.

Within this framework, the concept of “glitch” or “error” also shifts meaning. It can be linked to this same condition of instability: when structures are temporarily suspended or reconfigured, misalignment becomes part of the process rather than its failure. In such situations, glitch is not an exception in order but a byproduct of shifting orders — a moment where the system does not fully stabilize and something else briefly becomes perceptible.

However, I am not interested in romanticizing an 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.

We chose to hold the exhibition in an immigrant neighborhood rather than a tourist district, and that was very important to us. I myself live nearby and see people from all over the world every day. When everyone around you is an outsider, you no longer feel like one yourself; eventually, everyone becomes part of the same community. There’s something remarkably comforting about that.

Floréal Belleville is a French gallery with its own community, and alongside Russian-speaking visitors, many French people came to see the exhibition. It was interesting to watch how they responded to our reflections on relocation and the emotional experience of starting over. These stories — about movement, growing up, and major life transitions — are international and universal. They don’t require translation or explanatory notes.

Some artists submitted fully realised projects, while with others we were still finishing pieces right up until the evening before the opening. And to me, that’s the essence of the project itself – not trying to fix every error, but allowing the process to unfold on its own.

The theme of the exhibition emerged quite naturally: the experience of emigration and disconnection from place, yet we wanted to return to the question of rebuilding connections rather than loss. Interestingly, there was no sense of pessimistic media determinism among the works. In every piece, one could feel an urge to “step beyond” technology or tame it in order to return to something human and personal: the artists were reflecting, rather, on overcoming spatial and digital alienation between people, on how one might attempt to construct another reality. Here one recalls Claire Bishop’s argument from her latest book “Disordered Attention”: technology is not going anywhere, and we must engage with it and work through it.

In this sense, the glitch — emerging as an effect of broken communication — is not a breakdown; it could be a method. By making mistakes, we seem to prove that we are human. In psychoanalysis, it is 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 had not previously been aware of. Human and machine errors are alike: inevitable, and it is through them that something genuine surfaces. In an age of hyperproductivity and hyper-idealized systems, human error unexpectedly acquires value. I think this is also fundamental when working with art. Let the gap exist. Let the process unfold on its own.