GESTURES OF TRANSMISSION

How do we communicate without words? How do we speak without saying? How can language be transmitted, or translated, through sound and movement? Since 2012, Angelica Mesiti has explored the varieties and potentials of nonverbal communication in communities and with performers around the world. Beginning with Citizens Band (2012), Mesiti recorded four musical performers working outside traditional musical venues—from a Cameroonian woman who drums in a Parisian public pool, to a whistling Brisbane taxicab driver—and displayed footage of them all together in a cacophonous four-channel installation. Moving from the urban setting to the rural in her next project, Mesiti looked at three remote locations—in northern Turkey, the Canary Islands, and the island of Evia in Greece—where whistling is traditionally used to communicate across large distances. In recent three-channel works, she employed a sign-language choir for The Colour of Saying (2015), while Relay League (2017) features a musician-composer and dancers interpreting the final Morse code message transmitted by the French navy in 1997 through rhythm, movement and touch. Mesiti’s latest work is ASSEMBLY (2019), a newly commissioned installation filmed in the Roman Senate and the Australian Senate in Old Parliament House that interprets the turbulent conditions of democracies today. The work will premiere at the 58th Venice Biennale in the Australia Pavilion presented by the Australia Council for the Arts and curated by Juliana Engberg. In March, Rachel Kent, chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, sat down with Angelica Mesiti to talk with her about her methodology of making moving-image installations and her motivations for ASSEMBLY.

When people talk about your practice, they often say you’re an artist who works with performance and installation but that video is