Angelica Mesiti | Reverb

An aesthetics of gesture in dialogue with the Tinguely Museum

Seven vertical screens diffract a filmic tale into seven moments, from the cosmic to the human scale. Angelica Mesiti’s work The Rites of When (2024) approaches social rituals from a sidereal perspective, through nature and collective choreographies. Dancing is the common element linking distant realities – from tractors drawing patterns in cornfields to snapping and clapping hands – the element that makes it possible to overcome distance and enter a unified reality. A wonderful work on sound holds the diffracted images together.

This major work by Mesiti is one of five video installations at the Tinguely Museum Basel that, as the title of the exhibition, Reverb, suggests, reverberate with one another. One Hundred Years (2020) connects to The Rites of When through its more-than-human perspective. The infamous Battle of the Somme during World War I is “celebrated” here through an insistence on regenerating landscapes. In both artworks, regeneration seems to play an interesting counterpoint to Jean Tinguely’s Mengele-Totentanz (1986), which is shown in the next room.

Placed on the staircase, Prepared Piano for Movers (Haussmann) (2012) is also in dialogue with the museum, as we see two people transporting a piano through the narrow staircase of a Parisian building. This work reverberates with the other films in the exhibition through the connection between sound and the body. Sound is a fundamental mainstay in Mesiti’s art, primarily in its relation to movement or dance. The open reference to John Cage’s musical practice in Prepared Piano for Movers (Haussmann) stresses how music is part of a theatrical or, rather, filmic “gesture.”

I would say that gesture is probably the decisive keyword for Mesiti’s aesthetics. The work that most explicitly thematises dance, Relay League (2017), is not focused on the final form of a choreography but on the grammar of choreographic gestures, which we see communicated through touch from a performer to a visually impaired dancer. As the drum music is based on the last message sent in Morse code by the French Navy in 1997, this poetic three-channel film conveys a circulation of the senses that becomes an ode to analogue communication.

Relay League is placed in the main hall together with Sidereal (2024), whose large screen is suspended above Jean Tinguely’s big machines. Physicality is certainly the common thread linking Mesiti’s and Tinguely’s works, while Mesiti articulates it as sensuality and as a reflection on the senses gathered and exposed through the medium of film. The aerial dance that we see in Sidereal not only confirms the continuity between what is screened and its spatial installation in Mesiti’s works, but also brings a specific lightness to the space: a humanist lightness that vibrates through collective gestures.