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Angelica Mesiti, pictured with her major artwork The Rites of When, sat down with ABC Arts for the new series,
What Sparks Art. (ABC Arts: Eloise Fuss) |
By Eloise Fuss
From the bright upper levels of the Art Gallery of New South Wales' new building, Naala Badu, Angelica Mesiti leads me down a wide, white spiral staircase and into the art space, The Tank.
She's the second artist ever to exhibit in this room in the dark, cavernous basement of the gallery, where beams stretch from floor to ceiling and an oily scent lingers from its former life as a WWII oil tank.
The only light comes from the bright video screens lining the edge of the room: Mesiti's latest mesmerising artwork, The Rites of When.
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Angelica Mesiti is one of Australia's most acclaimed contemporary artists — but where does she get her
ideas and inspiration? (Supplied: AGNSW/Angelica Mesiti) |
Now based in Paris, Mesiti is one of Australia's most acclaimed contemporary artists, having exhibited in major institutions around the world and represented Australia at the prestigious Venice Biennale in 2019.
Her immersive, sensory artworks, often displayed across multiple large video screens, are rich in story and sound.
Her video work The Calling (2024, ACMI) took viewers to a village in northern Türkiye, where locals communicated across hillsides using a traditional whistling language.
For her latest artwork, viewers are surrounded by dance and song, in a work that re-imagines rituals related to seasonal cycles, in a time of environmental uncertainty.
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In Mesiti's immersive work, The Rites of When, video moves across large vertical screens in an
underground space. (Supplied: AGNSW/Angelica Mesiti) |
"A lot of the time, [my work] involves music, dance, groups performing and playing together as a way of thinking about who we are and how we exist today," Mesiti says.
Her latest powerful artwork began with ideas and observations jotted down in the Notes app on her phone.
She likens her process to a Bowerbird collecting things; "then you start to see patterns emerging", she says.
In ABC Arts' new series, What Sparks Art, we ask leading artists where they get their ideas and inspiration, and what drives their creativity.
For Mesiti, inspiration comes "from being outside in the world" — her day-to-day experiences, what she observes on the street, what she reads or exhibitions she sees.
We sit down with Mesiti to delve deeper into exactly what some of those things are.
Strange market treasures
Whenever I travel, I like to see if there are second-hand markets. Paris has a lot of great ones [and] in Korea and in Georgia.
I find it really interesting to see everyday objects from other countries and what people hold onto. They're not usually things high in value. It's like a museum of the everyday.
The point of inspiration for Assembly, the work I made for the Australian Pavilion in Venice, was an object I found in a flea market in Rome. It's called the Michaela machine. I got really fascinated by it because it looks like a musical instrument, but it's actually a typewriter. It's a Hansard machine that's used for recording spoken voice. In Italy, it's used in parliament.
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A still from the video artwork Assembly, featuring the Michaela machine, a device used for transcription.
(Image: Bonnie Elliott. Supplied: Angelica Mesiti and Anna Schwartz Gallery) |
I just loved that it was this strange hybrid object, somewhere between a musical instrument and a keyboard, but that also had a role to play in the democratic process.
I thought if you can write text on this instrument, then the text you're writing could also be music.
So, for Assembly, we used the machine to type out a David Malouf poem, which speaks about language and migration and not having a common language. We recorded the notes that were used in writing this poem, and then those notes became a score that was played by musicians across multiple instruments.
Observations on the Paris Metro
I've always caught the Metro since I arrived in Paris, and I've noticed how it's changed over that 10-year period. People are mostly on their phones now.
The Metro is a bit of a microcosm of everything that's going on in a city in this one space. You get a good sense of who lives in a place by observing what's happening on the Metro.
My work up until now has always been tied to urban existence and experience, like where populations and communities are brushing up against each other and having to live in parallel. All the beauty and the tensions that can cause has been an idea that's important and interesting to me.
There's a lot of people who busk on the Metro. That's how I met Mohammed [Lamourie, a Paris-based Algerian musician], who is in [Mesiti's 2012 artwork] Citizen's Band — he came onto the Metro one day, and that was the trigger for that whole piece I made.
Citizen's Band is a work where four people perform different music or gestures that relate to their cultural origins, but the performances are all in the context of the city they have moved to (Paris and Sydney).
Mohammed is an incredible performer. He is sight impaired and he has this beautiful, untrained, quite raw voice, but he also plays a Casio keyboard that he rests on his shoulder, and he almost plays it like a violin. He was singing Arabic translations of familiar songs — he even does a rendition of Hotel California. It was really unusual, very visually striking. I'd never seen anyone do that before, I was fascinated.
Always dancing
Since I was a kid, I've loved to dance. I'm really interested in why humans dance. It's something we've done since the beginning of time, and it feels like one of our essential human needs.
Dance has never been far from a lot of my projects. I use that term "dance" really broadly — it can also mean gesture.
The piece The Rites of When is trying to re-imagine traditional folk dances — you might think of people holding hands and dancing around a bonfire, which is the village-style circle dance. There's actually lots of historical evidence showing it's one of the earliest dances ever performed by people.
We've re-imagined that for a contemporary context — it's being danced in a Paris car park by young people wearing puffer jackets, Doc Martin boots and Adidas. The final sequence is making reference to a dance party or club environment where people are losing themselves in music.
Joyous and solemn Catholic festivals
I have roots in the south of Italy. My grandparents all migrated from Calabria and, living in Europe, I travel to Italy sometimes in the summer — we have friends and family there. A lot of inspiration for work has come out of some of those trips.
In the summertime, especially in the south, there's a lot of big festivals structured around Catholic saints. There'll be processions through the streets … they're festive and solemn at the same time, which I think is really interesting — the expressive exuberance of the Italian character but with this very solemn, guilt-ridden Catholic side as well.
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Rites of When re-imagines southern European religion's traditions in a non-religious context.
(Supplied: AGNSW/Angelica Mesiti) |
It feels like it belongs to another time. It's a deep tradition that always fascinates me.
The Rites of When features a procession and a circle dance, which are really influenced by my heritage and by those experiences in the south of Italy — a lot of these traditions go across the Mediterranean and southern Europe as well.
France and its 'deep respect' for artists
I started going to Paris in 2006/07 with the Kingpins, an Australian performance collective I was part of. On one of those trips, I met my husband. I applied for residency in Paris, and then just started making work there … It sort of flowed from there. It wasn't a big life plan to move to Paris one day, it just happened.
I started putting roots down in about 2012. For me, Paris has been a very nourishing place to be as an artist. It's the museums and exposure to a high volume of contemporary and historical art — but I think there is also a deep respect for artists in France.
I remember when I first got there and my partner and I got married … we had a civil ceremony and the celebrant was like, "And artists will always be welcome in this city".
I was like, 'What?' I don't know if that would be part of the ceremony in other places. I've always felt like it's a place that is nurturing of artists — even in its economic structure, it is very supportive.
Also Paris itself is a fascinating city. The French have an amazing belief in demonstrating for their rights and for their beliefs. I've been inspired by the way they publicly mobilise en masse. That's really had quite a big impact on … my artistic life.
The work, Assembly, for example, is a choreography based on hand gestures that were developed by Parisians during demonstrations … for communicating your ascent or discord with a speaker in a way that doesn't interrupt them.
They have ties with sign language as well. And so that was a direct influence.
I think that living somewhere where it's not your culture and your language really shapes you.
What language you speak affects your thoughts — you think differently because things are expressed differently … You're sort of straddling two languages, two cultural experiences.
I like being in two places at once.
Angelica Mesiti: The Rites of When is at the Nelson Packer Tank, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Naala Badu building until May 11, 2025.
First published at ABC News, January 31, 2025
