Mutonia is a village inside a village, a temporary town that changes over time. This little place was conceived with the same anarchic, irreverent and experimental spirit of the travellers and cyber punks who founded it. It became their hometown, a ‘motherland’ to go back to periodically or even settle down in to raise their children. Such an original place to live, made of assembled pieces of junk and vehicles transformed into houses, now risks extinction because no urban development plan that could safeguard its uniqueness exists. That uniqueness boils down to daily life, inventiveness, fragility, energy, rule-breaking and needing roots (like any other kind of life).

Director’s statement
Campers, houses that double as offices, sculptures made of junk, outdoor kitchens, play houses, solar showers, mechanical animals, pyres, and barbecues with flame-throwers: the Mutoid camp is an experiment in residential living, an unstable community that mixes post-industrial imagery, recycling, and self-management. It redefines the relationship between habitation, land consumption and the safeguarding of the biological and historical habitat in an ex-quarry on the Marecchia River. The film was made at a delicate moment, when the city council had ordered the residents to dismantle the camp and return it to the way it was 23 years before. Living in temporary, mobile constructions appears to now rank as one of our liberties needing defending, even when precariousness is a choice and not a misfortune.