Synopsis
"The Babels" are irregular artists who have created - outside or at the borders of the official and the art market - their own imaginary universe. This audio-visual research on men and places "on the margins", mainly in the Emilia-Romagna area, outlines an anarchic geography animated by unknown self-taught people who have consecrated decades of their lives to a total work. Fascinating and unusual stories of "abusive imagination and creativity" entrusted to men who with their hands transform iron, wood, cement, waste, scraps and common objects into creations suspended between art brut and visionary naïve craftsmanship.
The protagonists of this "Babel" tale are three figures that we find on the edge of the "Via Emilia" axis; the youngest is Renato Mancini, known as Mancio, sculptor, or rather welder, of wonderful works built with recycled or discarded metal materials. A metalworker as a worker, but also as an artist, he is just over 60 years old and, for about 40 years, has been creating figures inspired by the animal world or by well-known and invented characters, assembling screws, engine blocks, spark plugs, wheels, bolts, tanks, etc.; His gaze is capable of penetrating the most shapeless objects to recognize in their volume, or in the intersection of that with other volumes, the most disparate figures: insects, dogs, fish, musical instruments, faces, muses.
Then there is Emilio Padovani. The sprightly 70-year-old is a "primordial" sculptor who collects stones, or boulders, of all sizes to give life to works, in some cases imposing, representing the most varied creatures and, above all, dinosaurs: Triceratopes, T-Rexes, brontosaurs, stegosaurs and others invented from scratch dominate the large garden of his house in the countryside, held together only by a few iron pins to weld the stones that he himself drills with a special drill. All rigorously built with the stones that he finds abandoned in the fields, in the quarries or along the rivers, in Italy and abroad, and that he laboriously transports to his home.
Finally Elio Cangini, known as "Gianè". On a farm lying on the side of the state road that crosses the Apennines, the 79-year-old has built an imaginative world of impressive density, variety and beauty: a tunnel made up of intertwined woods, all collected along the river, which winds for about 70 meters and decorated inside with dozens of small and unusual nativity scenes; "haystacks" of concrete, stones and building waste that recall in shape the typical accumulations of wood and brushwood that ignite during the ritual Bonfire Festival of his town. And then an ancient and underground Gallic tomb that he decorated with an altar, bottles and dozens of small pieces of wood hanging from the ceiling, as if to evoke a pagan and mestizo cult. Finally, both inside an old chicken coop and in an old stable inside the old village, Cangini has accumulated an impressive amount of objects: from the painting to the coffee cup, from the ancient peasant tool to the toy, to the book, to the junk, everything is piled up, hung, thrown into every corner and hole of spaces that become bazaars and mirrors of dreamlike visions and intimate obsessions.
Credits
Production: Officinemedia
Direction, screenplay, photography and editing: Alessandro Quadretti
Music: Massi Amadori
Assistant director: Alvise Raimondi
Colorist: Daniel Pallucca
Selected in competition at the Aegean Docs - International Film Festival 2018, at the Ismailia Film Festival 2019 and at the RIFF - Rome Independent Film Festival 2018, out of competition at the Baikal Festival "People and Environment" 2018. Selected within the MediMed 2018 market.