Located only a few hundred meters away from the springs of the Seine River, the village of Blessey has a deeply symbolic relationship with water, as well as with its monumental limestone washhouse. Built in 1836, the washhouse was restored at considerable cost in the late 1990s. Upon completion of the works, the dwindling community of Blessey decided to commission an artist to create a statue celebrating this achievement. When offered the commission, Rémy Zaugg was baffled by the task and his spontaneous reaction was to write an honest and provocative letter to the community in which he criticized the project as “silly and grotesque … a costly luxury, unjustified, useless, antisocial, thoughtless, and therefore harmful.” Zaugg, however, made a counterproposal: he would accept the task, but only on the condition that his work would not be understood as a sculpture to celebrate the restoration of the washhouse, but rather as a more ambitious collective effort to give it a new sense of meaning by integrating it into the broader context of the village and its natural surroundings. Thanks to the impeccable mediation of Xavier Douroux—cofounder and director of the acclaimed contemporary art institute Le Consortium, in Dijon—the community trusted the artist, approved the project, and local landowners even gave up a portion of their private land to accommodate it. Slicing through the rural landscape from hill to hill, a long concrete containment wall now encloses the water that timidly flows out of the washhouse, giving shape to a small triangular artificial lake. Not only does this constitute a touching piece of land art, it also works as a new, attractive place of encounter and a valuable collective resource for the village.
Text: Mirko Gatti
