Plessi's reputation skyrocketed when he displayed his large and splendidly sensual video installation “Roma” at the Documenta 1987. In Berlin his work was part of the exhibition “Video Sculpture” in 1989, but its formalism was far more austere and “dry”. His recent video sculptures “armadi/stanze” (cupboards/rooms) can be situated between these two poles. Falling stones; drifting wood; displays that are covered, barred. What unites these heterogenous elements is the video-reflection on water in all its forms. For the VideoFest and the space of the gallery at the Pariser Platz next to the Brandenburg Gate, Plessi has created a new work: “Stanze delle parole” - “Room of Words”. A cupboard with 14 monitors and a long row of stapled books underneath. Old paper, dust, the weight of the material. On the black and white video image, grainy and worn-out, repeated 14 times, an opened book is seen, its pages moved by the wind. One cannot discern the words printed, what prevails is the sense of lost meaning, the vanishing of thoughts that we cannot grasp. Words, ideologies - blown in the wind. Rain falls. The future of the Academy is written on one page, the future of thegallery on another. There are plans to restore the former seat of the Academy at the Pariser Platz. The way it is, it will not remain. Plessi’s work exerts a double archeology: it uses an historical place to trace the past and the future at the same time. What is about to vanish, will once be explored by writers or by archeologists.The installation was realized by the Centro Videoarte of the Palazzo dei Diamanti di Ferrara, directed by Lola Bonora and produced by Carlo Ansaloni.