Building Babel

"An original research that explores for the first time an odd Italian geography by tracking the sites of "builders of dreams and imagination"

A retired railroad worker who for fifty years has built on a hill in the Cinque Terre great figures using recycled materials, and created a huge nativity scene illuminated by thousands of bulbs. A builder from Messina, which transformed a shack in a dream home, including mosaics and concrete elephants, then dismantled by strong economic powers of his own town. A cathedral of rock, the result of forty years of research on the bank of the Adige. A farmer and a fourty-five feet Sardinian woman made of plastic and chicken-wire fences. A craftsman of the Marche that created a wooden globe with thirty feet in circumference. These and others are the builders of Babel ... Here, for the first time, there is an attempt to reconstruct a visionary geography: an anarchist geography is always hovering between accumulation and collapse, driven by self-taught artists who have devoted decades of their lives to a total work, although often surrounded by indifference and hostility. The book includes unusual anthropological studies by researchers who describe little-known enterprises to give back their full value, while questioning the fate of these fragile outside-the-rules worlds. With essays by: Cristina Calicelli (irregular art – creative workshops in mental hospitals); Luisa Del Giudice (anthropologist -director of the Italian Oral History Institute at the University of California Los Angeles); Eva Di Stefano (professor of Contemporary History of Art at the University of Palermo and director of Osservatorio Outsider Art); Bruno Montpied (an expert of outside-of-rules sites in France); Daniela Rosi (coordinates the Outsider Art Centre for Accademia di Belle Arti, Verona); Bianca Tosatti (a leading international expert of irregular art); Roberta Trapani (a founding member of Art Brut collective).
 
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