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).
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.
The fantastic garden, an art environment made by Luigi Buffo (1919-1997), doesn't exist any more.
Life and works
Born in Mareno di Piave, Treviso, Italy, Luigi Buffo from childhood on had to work as a farmhand, without enjoying any schooling. Later on he migrated from Italy to the south of France, where he had a job as a mason. He settled in the small community of Lagardelle sur Lèze, south of the city of Toulouse.
Around 1980 Buffo began making all kind of sculptures from concrete which he installed in the garden of his house. He impersonated holy persons, ordinary people, animals and so on. He also has been making wooden sculptures.
this picture (thanks to Art Insolite Amis) gives an idea of Buffo's sculpture garden
Luigi Buffo has been active in making sculptures for at least some twenty years.
When I wrote the original version of this post, the internet just had a few sources about Buffo's life and work, like French weblogs Animula Vagula and le Poignard Subtil. There may be some written French sources (in periodicals), but these are out of my reach.
The site has been destroyed
Buffo died in 1997. Around 2003 the inheritors, in order to sell the house, destroyed almost all concrete sculptures. At the last moment the wooden sculptures have been saved from being burned, just because some interested people managed to get a deal with the family.
So, thanks to Martine and Pierre-Louis Boudra, who run a small private museum on outsider, naive and folk art in the south of France, these wooden sculptures (as in the first picture, above) nowadays still can be admired.
The museum of the Boudra's, les Amoureux d'Angélique, is located in Carla-Bayle, in the Ariège department (More about this private museum, with a variety of pictures, in the weblog of Sophie Lepetit, April 5, 2014).
Documentation
* A series of pictures of the wooden sculptures in the Musée Amoureux d'Angélique on the weblog of Sophie Lepetit (April 2014) * Animula Vagula: diashow of Buffo's concrete structures
* Bruno Montpied's weblog, le Poignard Subtil:pictures of (mainly the wooden) sculptures
* The weblog of Jean-Michel Chesné (March 2011) has a number of photographs of the sculptures made by Jean-François Maurice, who has visited Luigi Buffo just before he became ill
* Glaudio da Silva, Le sanctuaire de Buffo, movie, 2006, 20' * Most of the wooden sculptures from the Amoureux d'Angélique collection have been part of the Banditi dell'Arteexposition (Paris, 2012)
Video * In relation with this expo a video was made (1'12", YouTube, April 2012, Halle Saint Pierre, Paris)
first published August 2010, last revised April 2014
Luigi (also Louis, or Lui) Buffo Jardin Fantastique 31870 Lagardelle sur Lèze, dept Haute-Garonne, region Occitanie, France site demolished saved wooden sculptures in: Musée les Amoureux d'Angélique 09130 Carla Bayle, dept Arriège, region Occitanie, France
picture courtesy of Trymanit (Flickr, September 2009)
Oreste Fernando Nannetti (1927-1994) is known because of an enormous graffiti he carved into the cement of an outside wall of the psychiatric institution in Volterra, Italy, where he was hospitalized. The creation, made between 1959 and 1972, was some 180 m long and some 1.20 m high.
Life and works
Nannetti has spent most of his life in institutions. He was born in Rome, never knew who his father was, and when he was seven, he already was included into a charitable institution. At the age of ten he came to live in an institution for people with a a mental handicap.
At the age of 21, in 1948, he had to appear in court because of insulting authorities. He was not formally sentenced, as he was declared to be psychiatric, so he was sent into a psychiatric institution in Rome.
In 1958 Nannetti was transferred to the psychiatric hospital in the city of Volterra, at that time one of the largest (and outdated) institutions in Italy.
Here, in 1959, he began making his creation on the wall. Having no instruments, he used the buckle of his belt to carve the drawings and texts into the plaster.
picture from the weblog Lema Sabachthani
(not available anymore)
Nannetti also has produced texts and drawings on paper made by pen and ink, some 1700 altogether, combined into a large book. These creations have gone lost, being burned, together with some personal belongings after he left the hospital. However, of this creation photocopies have been made.
He also has decorated a 106 m long guard rail, but this one has definitely disappeared.
picture courtesy of Astrid Berglund
In his works Nannetti, who preferred to refer to himself as NOF4 or Nanof, evokes an imaginary world. He depicts himself as an astral colonel or an astronautic mining engineer and he tells stories about cosmic travels, conquests of imaginary countries, telepathic cosmic connections, magical powers and fantastic impersonations, all together creating his own fantasy world, of which he himself is one of the main characters.
After he was discharged from the clinic in 1973 Nannetti settled in the city of Volterra, where he died in 1994. I have not found information about the way he earned a living during the last twenty years of his life.
Saving what has remained of the creation
In 1978 the Italian government made the rather drastic decision to close all large psychiatric institutions in the country. This also concerned the institute in Volterra, which was closed in 1979.
Aldo Trafeli, who worked as a nurse in the hospital and who had recognized the significance of Nannetti's inscriptions, made sure that they were photographed (by Pier Nello Manoni -see documentation).
After the institute was closed, the buildings just have been left as they were. The graffiti wall became neglected and meanwhile about half of the plaster has gone.
Although there always have been people who were interested in this work, as it was seen as a rather authentic specimen of art brut, only from around 2010 there was more general interest. Pleas to save the work appeared in writing and on videos and a non-profit organisation was formed (Inclusione Graffio & Parole) to save what has been left of the graffiti.
A piece of 8 meters of wall with inscriptions has now been saved and restored
Expositions
In 2010, from September 3 until October 3, Nannetti's creations could be seen at an exposition of (graffitied and textual) outsider art in the city of Genova, Museoteatro della Commenda di Pré, curated by Gustavo Giacosa of the association ContemporArt
In 2011 the Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne had an exposition about Nannetti's work (May 13 - October 30). The catalog of this expo had contributions of Lucienne Peiry, Antonio Tabucchi, Anne Lovell, Pier Nello Manoni, Ilario Rossi, Vincent Capt and Jessica Schupbach. It came with a 7 m long unfoldable page and a 20 min video.
Situation in 2022
Above picture was made by Tiramisu Bootfighter in July 2022 during a trip he made in the context of his projectLa Valise, Galerie Ambulante. The photo shows that the decorations on the wall are still in reasonable condition, but gradually decaying.
Documentation
* Mino Trafeli & Pier Nello Manoni(photo's), NOF4, Il libro della vita, 1984 (Ed. del Cerro)
* A film by Pier Nello and Erika Manoni, I graffiti della mente, 20’, italian, undertitles in french or english, Produced by Blue Films, Rome, 2002. (Available on DVD)
* Lucienne Peiry, "Il soliloquio lapidario di Nannetti", in: Quaderni d' altri tempi #64 (2016) (this article is the re-edited introduction to the catalog of the 2011 exposition in the Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne)
* A fotoseries on Flickr by Carlo Tardani (uploaded May 2011) about the abandoned psychiatric hospital
* Article on SPACES website (2012)
* Book by Lucienne Peiry, Le livre de Pierre (The stone book). Paris (Allia Ed), 2020, with pictures of drawings by Nannetti and photographs by Pierre Nello Manoni and Mario del Curto
Videos
* Video byFederico Formica, Salvate il graffiti dell follia (5'50", 2010, Vimeo)
* Trailer on YouTube to promote the photo exposition NOF4, E' fantascienza, non follia! (2010) by Francesco Cortonesi, Abramo de Licio, Silvia Baglioni
* Video by Pier Nello Manoni (4'44", YouTube, January 2019), entry for the 2019 Raw Vision short film competition
first published August 2010, last revised July 2022
Oreste Fernando Nannetti I Graffiti di NOF4 Volterra, Toscane, Italy gradually decaying
visiting:
the website Manicomio di Volterra, with all kinds of information about the history of and writings about the hospital, has a reference at the end of the main page to options of a guided visit to Volterra
At the top of a terraced hill just outside the hamlet Valdonica in Liguria, Italy, a single-handedly built castle dominates a garden with wire-shaped structures that refer to the galaxy.
Life and works
This art environment has been created by Umberto Bonini (1926-2002), who was the owner of a shop selling men's clothes in the Ligurian city of La Spezia.
In the 1960s when staying in a psychiatric hospital because of a depression, he got visions of a circular structure that turned towards the light.
Once healed and with this experience in mind, in the 1970s on a plot of land he owned, just outside the hamlet Valdonica (part of Calice al Cornoviglio, some 25 km north of la Spezia), Bonini began constructing a castle-like structure, with walls and towers, using stones and pebbles from a nearby river.
this picture and the next two courtesy of Mario Bonini
The walls of the buildings have been embellished with sculpted faces.
The site has a beautiful garden with terraces, ponds, footpaths, lawns, etc., all made and laid out singlehandedly by Bonini.
And then, from construction iron Bonini made all kinds of spheres, tubes and cylinders, which he displayed in the garden and on the buildings, as can be seen in the pictures above and below. A number of these constructions depicted the galactic universe, so that's why the site is named after the galaxy.
The complex is separated from the provincial road by an iron fence, which is decorated in various ways and is provided with texts.
Umberto Bonini has been active in creating this art environment for some thirty years. He passed away in 2002.
Currently his son. Mario Bonini, takes care of the site, which occasionally can be visited as a museum.
* Article on SPACES website
* More pictures on Francesco Galli's website * Article in Wikipedia
* Article (30 September 2016) by Freya76 on website Giorni Rubati
Umberto Bonini
Museo della Galassia
Calice al Cornoviglio (hamlet Valdonica), Liguria, Italy
just outside Valdonica, along the provincial road can partly be seen from the road occasionally open on Sundays and public holidays streetview
The facade tells a lot. This house, located in Sotteville-les-Rouens in Normandy, France, is named Mon Désir (My Desire), the two capital letters M.D. left above could indicate the maker M. Dulong, the house was constructed in 1936 and the decorations are la mosaïque.
When in 2010 I did the first version of this post, I did not know the name of the one who made these decorations. The limited information then available on the internet included that the house was built and decorated by an employee of the French national railroads company SNCF and that he was a mason.
In 2015 however I found an article on the weblog of Pascal Levaillantwith a report of his visit to the house and a lot of pictures too. In passing the author refers to M. Dulong as the one who decorated the house and he also remarks that the inscription M.D. on the facade relates to his initials.
The author of the mosaics was a railwayman indeed, who had a job a the depot of the SNCF in Sotteville. To create the mosaics he used all kind of waste material, but also pieces of crockery he collected after the bombing of the city in World War II. The house itself was spared in the bombing.
.
In most French sources this art environment is commonly referred to as the house of Michel Crépin, who was the one who in 1972 bought it, proud that he could live in such a beautifully decorated house.
He took care that the mosaics remained intact. However, in an image taken on Google Streetview in November 2022, the decorations have faded away to a large extent and little remains of the former allure of Mon Désir.
Documentation * Article (September 2014) in the weblog of Pascal Levaillant with a lot of pictures of the mosaics
* The Art Insolite website has more pictures of this environment (Adobe Flash Player needed).
* Pascale Lemare, Normandie Insolite (Ed Bonneton, 2005) writes about the house and its decorations (but he does not disclose who was the original author and gives an incorrect address),
first published August 2010, last revised October 2023
M. Dulong Villa "Mon Désir" 12 rue de la Nation 76300 Sotteville-les-Rouens, dept Seine-Maritime, region Normandy, France no public visits,
