Bizhan Bassiri began his 1984 Manifesto with the following words: “Being for the first time on the crater, I felt the magmatic condition as if it were blood circulating through my veins and in my brain in its creative state. Since then, I have been the guest of that temple where phantoms take shape and stones resemble enormous animals.”

As the initial intuition evolved through experience, it became a “thought-in-progress”, delineated in two parallel texts, Pensiero Magmatico and Manifesto del pensiero magmatico. So molten hot is this Manifesto that it would require close analysis to grasp its newly-revealed meanings; in fact, the text takes the form of a poetics-in-the-making. From the beginning, Bassiri has resided in the world of words, writing texts ranging from single sentences to poetry. He has given a linguistic form to multiple visions and spiritual experiences, and recently, conceived a theatre piece with the 48 sentences of his Manifesto as the text.
For this new experience, we are no longer guided by the volcano, but rather by the chance of a sighting and detection of bodies that cool down and take shape when they enter the earth’s atmosphere. As sentence 10 of the Manifesto states, “The existence of the work of art in the world is a meteorite arriving from the cosmos, it does not belong to the Earth but appears to it.”
Every meteorite sighted is a victory of form and light; every work is a celebration of the successful completion of an initiation. Bassiri’s path is reflected in the solar mirrors that cease to function as mirrors, becoming instead sources of light that form the backdrop to the ‘Evento Manifesto del Pensiero Magmatico’ in a sequence of six acts conceived as a unit of vision and sound.

Introduced by Bruno Corà, Bizhan Bassiri read texts related to his poetic declaration, accompanied by music by Hans Werner Henze, Marcello Panni, Giorgio Battistelli and Stefano Taglietti.