In Our Current Climate Crisis, Angelica Mesiti Asks How Can We Re-Tune Ourselves
ARTnews describes a midnight filmed performance in Aubervilliers, north of Paris, in which Sydney-born, Paris-based artist Angelica Mesiti led about 35 participants through a three-hour procession featuring singing, headpieces, staffs made of dried plants and flowers, a bonfire, and fireworks from a papier-mâché donkey. The event drew on Italian patron saint processions Mesiti attended growing up with her Calabrian family in Sydney and became a chapter of her film The Rites of When (2024), which she characterizes as a speculative, quasi–science fiction work about an “out-of-sync world.” The film is now the centerpiece of Mesiti’s solo exhibition “Reverb” at the Museum Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland, on view through August 30. Installed as a seven-channel work (referencing the seven most visible stars in the Pleiades) in a room designed to evoke the 3,600-year-old Nebra sky disc, the piece links ritual, celestial alignments, and non-linear time, including a nod to the Indigenous Australian concept of “everywhen.”
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This story was covered in Safe Markets, Culture Wars, and Queer Reframing