MUTONIA

First published: March 2026

Post-apocalyptic, steampunk, futuristic all at once: a quarry in Italy is inhabited by Mutonia, a village of monumental mechanical inventions built from scrap

On the banks of the Marecchia River, just a stone’s throw from the centre of Santarcangelo di Romagna – a small, historic town near to Rimini in northern Italy – the hum of welding machines mingles with the whisper of the wind in a place seemingly outside of time. It feels suspended between dream and reality – a village that looks as though it has emerged from a post-apocalyptic film, where waste becomes art and finds new life in new forms. What was once discarded is now reclaimed, transformed and reimagined. This is Mutonia: an artistic village, a permanent theatre of mechanical invention that breathes life back into what consumer society deems finished and throws away.

Riù, by Lu Lupan and Pepè, has a soulful, almost human quality in his robot gaze. Photo: Alessandro Costa

To understand what Mutonia truly is, we must return to its origins. London, in the 1980s: punk and squatter movements multiply in protest against a society in which many can no longer see themselves. Out of this ferment, the Mutoid Waste Company was born – “founded” by Joe Rush and Robin Cooke – a collective of artists and performers who used waste and scrap to construct their works. Inspired by the aesthetics of Mad Max films and 2000AD comics, the Mutoids built monumental sculptures from industrial debris, dismantled car parts, discarded furniture and rusty television sets, giving new life to what others considered beyond repair.

lastr by Lyle Doghead. Photo: Alessandro Costa

Their creations illuminated the raves and illegal free parties of the London suburbs, standing as both spectacle and social critique – a denunciation of a culture that prefers disposal to repair, convenience to consciousness. Their aesthetic was a cry against mass production, a hymn to metamorphosis. “We use what we find. Everything that has been thrown away can be reborn,” Rush once said. It was not art in the conventional sense – there was no pursuit of beauty for its own sake – but rather an urgent, necessary art: one that exposes and challenges, that reclaims the right to transform decay into vitality. By the late 1980s – coming up against Margaret Thatcher’s crackdown on countercultural movements, and police raids on their warehouse base – the collective moved from the UK and began to roam across Europe. Berlin, Paris, Barcelona – their mutant machines appeared at underground festivals, in fields and in abandoned industrial sites, bringing sparks and music to off-the- beaten-track corners of the continent.