My Life with the Alpine Time Travellers

In 2006 David Bramwell went to visit a community called Damanhur, living in the Italian Alps. It was to be the first of many visits and the start of a lifelong fascination with the place.

Damanhur, a 600-strong community, had built the world’s most extraordinary piece of outsider art: an underground temple the size of St Paul’s Cathedral, one of the great architectural wonders of the modern world. The Damanhurians also named themselves after plants and animals, claimed to have taught a rubber plant how to sing and even built a fully-functioning ‘time machine’. Another case of a deluded cult? David didn’t think so.

After many visits (and a Radio 3 documentary), David finally thinks he’s figured Damanhur out. He believes that the Damanhurians have created something important and essential in the 21st century. And the time machine is only a tiny part of it.

What links this extraordinary community with the jazz musician Sun Ra? Is the time machine real? Who is Gorilla Eucalyptus? To find out, come to this talk, complete with astonishing images of the Temples of Humankind, singing plants and of course the community’s time machine.

David Bramwell is a co-author of The Odditorium: The tricksters, eccentrics, deviants and inventors whose obsessions changed the world, and author of two travel memoirs: The No9 Bus to Utopia and The Haunted Moustache. He has toured the UK with two award-winning one-man shows, made radio programmes for the BBC on themes ranging from Ivor Cutler to river goddesses with Alan Moore, and won a Sony Award for ‘best feature’ in 2012.