
FABRIZIO PLESSI
Fabrizio Plessi (Reggio Emilia, 1940) is one of the great masters of video art, who lives and works between Venice and Mallorca. The dialogue between this artist and the 17th-century stone water cistern set in the heart of Es Baluard develops around the “memory of water”. By way of a “call to the conscience of today’s society”, Plessi has conceived a new version of one of his most emblematic works, Bombay-Bombay, and chosen a new, significant name for it: I lavatoi dell’anima.
Produced in 1992, after the artist visited the enormous public washing place in Bombay, Dhobi Ghat, and dedicated to the great film director and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini, author of the work L'odore dell'India, this is an intimist, poetic piece that alludes both to the powerful symbolism of the river Ganges and the traditional activities revolving around water that are performed day after day in India.
As is habitual in all of his video sculptures, in “I lavatoi dell’anima new image technologies cohabit with elements as old as iron or cotton.
The artist sums up his proposal as follows:
“Bombay-Bombay
Although it would be fairer to call them ‘I lavatoi dell’anima’.
Remembering Pasolini.
Remembering L’odore dell’India, the only true, profound and existential guide ever written about Bombay.
Dhobi Ghat: The vast, endless public washing place awaited me at the moment I happened to pass by.
In the midst of the smoke, the heat, the water, the sweat, the shouts, the smells, I realised that the work ‘was already there’, intact in its extraordinary presence and moving, Dantaesque beauty.
All I had to do was transcribe it.” (Fabrizio Plessi. March, 1992)
Location-Hall: Aljub
Production: Es Baluard Museu d'Art Modern i Contemporani de Palma