Angelica Mesiti

Hum (Black Galaxy), 2021

Enamel paint on engraved granite,

diameter: 80 cm - depth: 3 cm - weight: 48 kg

Work presented as part of the exhibition Echos d'une collection - Works by Frac Franche-Comté

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This work belongs to a series of round black granite stones engraved and enhanced by hand with enamel paint. Angelica Mesiti thus translates into mineral permanence a sound belonging to the world of the immaterial and ephemeral. To achieve this, she uses techniques used for tombstones, collaborating with a stonemason, an engraver and a sign painter.

The work was created to accompany the video installation Over the Air and Underground (2020). The screens show decomposing flowers developing mycelial filaments. Trees are known to communicate via these fungal networks. The soundtrack is composed by the humming of ten voices in harmony with a 220 Hz tone, recorded underground as the roots of the sound tree emit their communication. The lighting in the videos uses ultraviolet light, which helps bees find their way to pollen.

Over the Air and Underground is a piece conceived after the first confinement due to the covid pandemic, during which Angelica Mesiti spent time observing the place of nature during her walks in the city.

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Angelica Mesiti

Born in 1976 in Sidney

Lives and works in Paris and Sydney

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Angelica Mesiti is a graduate of the Sidney School of Fine Arts. Previously, she had been involved in both classical and contemporary dance, and this experience has had a significant impact on her multidisciplinary artistic work. Questions about communication, about being together, are often introduced through music and movement, in performance or video.

Prepared Piano for Movers (Haussmann) (2012) shows movers, loaded with a piano, climbing the spiral staircase of a Paris apartment building. In this way, the two men create music, since the instrument has been "prepared" as John Cage would have done.

Angelica Mesiti likes to orchestrate polyphonies in her video installations, as with Mother Tongue (2017), which presents, on two screens, groups who all participate in their own way in the richness and diversity of their Danish city: municipal employees, Palestinian dancers, scouts, students from a circus school, low-income housing residents... This is also the case with Assembly, the installation with which the artist represented Australia at the 2019 Venice Biennale. The transcription of a poem by David Malouf (about the impossibility of translating certain feelings from one language to another, from one person to another) was made by a shorthand machine of political debates, then by music, songs, dances...

Her exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in 2019, reversing the definition of linguist J. L. Austin's theory of performative statements, was entitled Quand faire c'est dire. The exhibition featured both works in which she filmed existing situations in an almost conventional way, and video installations born of a provoked situation. For example, having an elderly dancer perform Swan Lake while seated.

Angelica Mesiti is a studio head at the Beaux-arts de Paris.