Reinwaschung / Abluzione Monastery of the Valvisciolo Abbey, Sermoneta (Italy), south of Rome

The exhibition consists of a site-specific installation and a series of sculptures made of marine plastic debris, through which the artist reflects on environmental sustainability choices in our daily life, especially in light of the water crisis that affects all of Europe.

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The term “ablution” (reinwaschung in German) is used in Catholic liturgy and in several religions - such as Judaic, Muslim or Hindu religion - to indicate a ceremonial act of washing one’s body with wather to achieve spiritual purification.

Artist Emanuel Mooner reframes this ancient liturgical action and makes it a starting point to think over environmental issues, which he intertwines with autobiographical anecdotes and universal symbols.

The project is inspired by an episode from the Eighties, when artist Kurt Römhild (1946-2021), Emanuel Mooner’s uncle, collected several pounds of plastic waste from a beach in Grosseto (Tuscany). Römhild, who lived and worked between Germany and Italy, brought back those scrap material with him to use them for an art project. Many years later after he had passed away, his nephew found the plastic debris from Grosseto in Munich. Thus, the scrap material and the unfinished uncle’s project became Mooner’s heritage. ow, the plastic marine debris are back to Italy and they have been reused to create new works and new meanings. In addition, the choice of the location is not a random one: the artist has chosen a sacred place such as the Valvisciolo Abbey revisiting a childhood memory, as he spent his early years in a German monastery with his family.

The Chapter house hosts resin led sculptures laid down in safety boxes like holy relics. Through the transparency of the resin and the evanescence emanating from the internal lights it is possible to distinguish plastic objects of all kinds: caps and bottle necks, ice cream spoons, parts of packaging. The sculptures resemble unusual objects of worship and the scraps they keep inside look like floating in an aquatic space. The works defiantly alludes to devotional objects for a fictional polymer-god, creator of the so-called Plastic Age and of an industrial realm where humans and no longer nature dictate the rhythms and limits of the world.

In the well of the Abbey, Mooner has designed a site-specific installation which aims to recall the main function of the well, that is of water supply, but also its former symbolic and magical nature. In the ancient scriptures the well is the place where a village could usually start growing, but it was also a meeting point, especially in the desert areas remembered by the Biblical stories. Other cultures had built legends and fairy tales around the wells. For examples, Germanic, Celtic, or Chinese ancient populations believed that their gods or magical creatures lived inside the wells, and for this reason they became places of worship. The well is also one of the Jungian unconscious’ archetypes for its permanent connection to water and to the depths of the Earth: metaphor for the inner dig which lead to an ancestral human consciousness. Likewise, Mooner’s installation asks the viewers one deep look inside. People are invited to look down in the well to find out that a pile of plastic garbage has now taken the place of the muddy water full of coins thrown by tourists.

Still, clean water flows from the well as it would do from a fountain, bubbling up through the waste. Building up an imagery entirely made of water and plastic, Mooner tries to point out the serious conditions which currently affects the natural environment, the urge of actions based on civic sense and respect for nature and the negative effects of industrial overproduction. The plastic collected from the sea becomes the mirror of contemporary society, of consumerism and bad habits.

Perfectly cleansed up and useless as they are now, the plastic pieces become an example for a new kind of ablution which brings no spiritual purification, but a daily warning to make sustainable choice and to take more care of our tired ecosystem.

  1. November 2022 until: 06. January 2023, open 24 hrs.

Part of the European Week of Waste Reduction:
https://ewwr.eu/

Stipendiat der STIFTUNG KUNSTFONDS.
www.kunstfonds.de

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(C) Munich artist Emanuel Mooner / Neon Artist, Neon Art

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