PRODUCTIONS: BUILDERS OF BABEL

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Eleonora Marino

SD Cinematografica

30 min.

HD & UHD

In small villages, in hidden gardens, among anonymous villas, along unknown paths, a minor, outsider Italy moves, revealing unexpected creations, carried out for a long time by particular visionary architects. The anthropologist Gabriele Mina called them Builders of Babel: they are self-taught and irregular artists, inspired by the roadside. Often they are workers, bricklayers, pensioners and one day they decide to devote their time – sometimes decades of existence – to the solitary realization of a total work: a mountain of wonders, a wall of carved stones, bizarre gnarled characters or an ideal city on a scale of 1 to 25. They mostly build around or on top of their homes, with a blueprint written in their minds, in dreams and use recycled materials, then paint, assemble, accumulate relentlessly. For the villagers they are curious creations, for families a legacy that is difficult to maintain. However, these architectures of utopia, such as the Tower of Babel, can collapse at any moment, vanish, and that is why it is important to keep memory of them by telling them.