Clean Slate

Concept

Power washing is one of the most watched kinds of video on the internet. People sit through twenty minutes of a stranger cleaning a driveway because the change is total and it happens in front of them. Nobody in India has made this content, and India has more surfaces that need it than anywhere else.

Clean Slate takes a Slayer to places that have been dirty so long nobody sees the dirt anymore. Apartment stilt floors. Auto stands. Factory yards. Temple courtyards the morning after a festival. Every episode is built the same way: one wide shot of the surface as it is, the wash, the same wide shot after. Very little talking. Whoever owns the place says a few words at the start and a few at the end, and that is all the script there is.

Some episodes hand the machine to a team of artists. Reverse graffiti: instead of putting paint on a surface, they wash an image out of the dirt. A pattern across an entire parking level, a portrait on a factory yard, a mural under a flyover that exists only because the grime around it was left alone. Same before-and-after, except the after is a piece of art and the only tool that touched it was the Slayer.

The machine makes the whole argument. Nothing needs to be said about pressure or flow rate because the viewer watches thirty years come off a floor in real time. This launches Slayer into a category that does not exist in India yet, the straight episodes are cheap to repeat, and the artist episodes are the ones that travel.

“The objective of cleaning is not just to clean, but to feel happiness living within that environment.”
— Marie Kondo