A new website: Costruttori di Babele / Builders of Babel

picture as shown in the header of the website

Authored by cultural anthropologist Gabriele Mina Costruttori di Babele (Builders of Babel) is a new Italian website about Italian visionary architecture made by self-taught artists.

Mina's aim is to inventorize and document these visionary constructions (in my terms: outsider environments) in an archive that is available on the internet, in this way providing the public with objective information,  illustrative images and bibliographic references.

He explains that the website "is dedicated to Italian visionary architecture, made by little known self-taught artists who - often in isolation - have devoted decades of their lives to building a complete work, a personal microcosm in the open air. An anarchist positioning, always balancing between accumulation and collapse, made of stone, concrete, wood, recycled materials, populated by appearances, faces and symbols"

The editor of the new website hopes that it will become a collective project like the tower of Babel was (and that it will hopefully not fall down, like Babel did).
  
Constructors who have been documented so far are Mario Andreoli, Umberto Bonini and Marcello Cammi. In prospect are Filippo Bentivegna, Giovanni Cammarata, Guerino Galzerano, Ezechiele Leandro and Angelo Stagnaro

The website is in Italian. In the end of 2010 a French version might become available.

I admire and welcome very much this initiative to inventorize and document Italian outsider environments, and will in my turn see how I can contribute to help disseminate information about these constructions and their creators.