Opinion
Plessi, Venice
In one of the last summers in Santanyí, I heard Plessi recount, for the first time, a story that deeply moved him when he told it: in January 1901, while the Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi was dying in his home in Milan, the citizens covered the streets with straw to silence the noise of the carriages and protect his rest.
In that gesture, there was something that went far beyond Verdi; it was about how a city altered its daily routine to create silence and preserve the peace of someone whose work had been a part of their lives. Perhaps that's why artists decide to create something, to evoke that human dimension whose emotion passes from one person to another until it takes on a fluid and synchronized form, becoming a gesture shared by an entire community.
When one thinks of water, one rarely hears it; if anything, one remembers it as a transmutable blue, always in contrast with its surroundings, malleable by both light and shadow—something Plessi taught us from the beginning. Plessi pursued the water of Venice, while, in turn, it was Venice that seeped through the pipes of his work, twisting in his drawings like an elusive image that had to be captured.
During the 1970s, he did almost everything with water that, by its very nature, cannot be done. Plessi tried to cut it with scissors, saw it in half, nail it, measure it, and even pierce it . But for him, water was not merely a material that could be cut, measured, or captured; it was also that from which Venice had to be protected from its ecological vulnerability. In 1972, in *Spugna d'emergenza in caso di alta marea a Venezia* (Emergency Sponge in Case of High Tide in Venice), Plessi imagined a monolithic sponge capable of absorbing the water from the canals and keeping Venice safe. The architectural installation was never realized and remained only as a series of utopian photocollages . Perhaps an impossible solution for a catastrophe that seemed to belong to the future.
It was through video and electronic imaging that Plessi finally achieved what scissors, nails, hammers, and even sponges had failed to do: to retain water without stopping it. Inside a TV monitor, water could fall eternally without ever reaching the ground, pass through a stone without wetting it, be cut in half and still remain water, and simultaneously transform into something else. These works brought the memory of Venice back to the future.
Perhaps what moved Plessi so deeply about Verdi's story was the capacity of a work to intervene in what happens outside of it. Plessi's work consisted of altering the natural order of things, but the true alteration occurred afterward, when the work passed through those who watched it and transformed them, making the world a more habitable place. I am part of that world. Thank you, Fabrizio.
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