In many regions of southern Italy, but increasingly also in the north, thousands of foreign workers coming mainly from sub-Saharan Africa create temporary villages every year in the vicinity of areas where the demand for labor is greatest.

Huts, tents, earth and stone houses, cardboard, plastic. These are the shelters of the laborers used in seasonal harvesting.

There are employment contracts and there aren’t, but the wages are always the same: 25 euros a day. The House? It is done with what is found.
A house with nothing.

BÄRAKKÄ is the home of the working poor, that is, of those who today, increasingly numerous, live in a condition of poverty while working. A precarious cardboard house, that of on-call contracts, of unpaid contributions, of the below cost that imposes competition between different arms and monoculture.

The house that does not exist, despite the fact that in Italy there are 18 billion cubic meters built against an aggregate requirement equal to one third of that built.

BÄRAKKÄ will come to life in the heart of the cities as a physical denunciation of the policies in place that redistribute wealth and opportunities upwards, discharging social and environmental costs downwards and calling for a new and necessary solidarity between workers of different nationalities.

The first BÄRAKKÄ was built in Borgo Taccone, an agricultural village in a state of semi-abandonment built in the 1950s in Basilicata. Thanks to Ibrahim – a worker from Burkina Faso who for years went to the north of Basilicata to harvest industrial tomatoes living in abandoned houses of the Agrarian Reform – we interviewed a small “seasonal” community of Burkinabé laborers living in the area of Montemilone.

From these meetings was born the Instruction Manual that you can download to build your own house with nothing. The procedure you find described inside, therefore, is part of a real practice of survival and adaptation to the “voids” of the territory.

The construction, carried out with recycled materials found in the various set-up locations, is therefore accompanied by the distribution of the instruction manual, a leaflet illustrated like those of the serial furniture giant IKEA.