Angelica Mesiti: where politics meets the art world

Communication has always been the most interesting theme in Angelica Mesiti’s work.

Angelica Mesiti, Relay League (video still), 2017, commissioned by Artspace. Courtesy the artist, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Galerie Allen, Paris.

The very title of David Malouf’s poem, To Be Written in Another Tongue (1976), is poignant, imbued with nostalgia and the sense of loss. For nothing embodies the feeling of home like a native language, though we usually don’t realise that until we are abroad, perhaps habituated to another world and its language, and then suddenly hear someone using our own speech. Nostalgia, the longing for homecoming, is the word for which the speaker in Malouf’s poem “ranges through the thesaurus” but does not use, leaving it to the reader to recall to mind.

The sense of homecoming is something we feel too when reading great literature, the discovery of our own language, or even another that we can read, as truly living, with a pulse of meaning and feeling; for most of the time we are surrounded by the stale cliches of commercial culture, the shallow chatter of cultural commentary or the dried-out husks of speech in the jargon of bureaucrats, peppered with the hypocritical signifiers of political compliance.

The poem seems to start in the middle, with the words “as for example”, as though a first stanza had been discarded. The general principle is elided, passing straight to its illustration, guided only by the enigmatic virtual imperative of the title.

The author – who in many respects feels like a spiritual descendant of Constantin Cavafy (1863-1933), the poet of Alexandria – imagines his grandfather speaking from the grave; the language is unnamed, but it must be Arabic, the tongue of his Levantine forebears. The poem evokes the sadness of diaspora communities in which grandparents cannot fully share the intimate knowledge of their own world and experience with grandchildren ignorant of the language that is the vital bearer of tradition.

Communication has always been the most interesting theme in Angelica Mesiti’s work, the most memorable example of which is still The Calling, the first project to be funded by the Ian Potter Moving Image Commission and shown at ACMI in 2014. This was a poetic meditation on the mystery of communication through language, which had the advantage of a semi-documentary structure and an intriguing topic, the whistling languages that survive in isolated communities in the Mediterranean, from Turkey to the Balearic Islands.

Later works have considered communication through the non-verbal media of music and even dance. This new video, Assembly, made for the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, brings together a number of these themes, employing dance, music and singing as well as Malouf’s words, albeit in a fragmentary written form.

The film is shot partly in the Palazzo Madama in Rome, seat of the Senate of the Italian Republic and partly in the Senate chamber of the Old Parliament House in Canberra, both of which are carpeted and furnished in red. So is the exhibition space itself, designed around a shallow circular pit with a couple steps, intended to recall some kind of meeting place. The title “Assembly”, which politically recalls the “ekklesia” of all the citizens of Athens, is not quite consistent with the nature of a Senate, and indeed Mesiti’s concept of “assembly” in the sense of social community doesn’t really correspond to the idea of a representative political body either, leading to some ambiguities in the work.

By coincidence, I entered the room just as the film was starting with a clerk sitting in the centre of the Senate in Rome and typing on a stenographic machine or stenotype. This itself is quite an unusual object, a mechanical aid to taking shorthand. Most of us, never having used one, or even learnt shorthand, will be surprised by how few keys it has. There are in fact far fewer than on the alphanumeric keyboard virtually everyone now uses every day. Writing cannot, therefore, be done by typing out each letter in succession; instead, words are abbreviated, as in normal shorthand, and letters – of which many are represented by a pair of keys – can be pressed at the same time, like chords on a piano.

In the centre of an empty Senate chamber then, a clerk is tapping on this enigmatic machine on one of the three screens that surround us, while another may show empty rows of seats and a third the text that he is typing, which comes scrolling out of a printer like a receipt in a shop, encoded in largely unintelligible abbreviations. When we know what the text is meant to be, we can just decipher fragments, with their altered spellings and disconcerting breaks.

So we are immediately confronted by an act ostensibly concerned with the communication, recording and transmission of language, but which is both arbitrary and inaccessible. The fact the poem itself is subsequently projected in normal textual form serves to emphasise the mechanical alienation of the stenographic transcription. This is clearly to be the foil for other and more intuitive forms of communication.

And indeed – as we learn, because we could not possibly infer it – the stenotype recording is somehow turned into a musical score; perhaps the idea was suggested by the fact the keyboard itself looks to the uninitiated like that of some kind of musical instrument. Another set of projected images does, however, make it clear Malouf’s poem has been set to a musical score.

And then we do meet with a recognisable keyboard, as a piano begins to play, in the Senate chamber of Old Parliament House. As the piano occupies one screen, others look around the chamber or up various corridors and spaces. Then other instruments join in, a clarinet and a viola, each in a different room of the old parliamentary buildings. The performances overlap rather than forming a harmonious ensemble.

Then there are singers too, a choir of young women who recall the way music quite literally unites different people in the shared act of performance, and in devotion to a discipline and an art that inherently transcend the egoism of the individual. With the exception of hymns and national anthems, however, singing is seldom heard in any place of formal political assembly, though it could be regarded as a distant utopian aspiration.

An episode with an Indigenous performer is something of a jarring note. She moves around an interior – possibly the old prime minister’s office – gazing balefully at various symbols of state, and taking a series of increasingly aggressive poses that look like the admonitory gestures of a referee in some kind of sports match. Her sullen presence is off-key with the tone and mood of the rest of Mesiti’s work, but it does actually recall the fact that parliamentary institutions are places for debate and even disagreement. In a more positive and joyful episode, a group of Lebanese wedding drummers, playing illuminated drums, cavorts in the nocturnal corridors of Old Parliament House like Bacchants, expressing a kind of communion in ecstatic involvement that is engaging but naturally very far from the structure and institutions of political community.

The spiritual and the political can in fact be considered as complementary but inherently distinct axes of human experience, one dealing with the systems of mutual connection between individuals in the social world, the other with a more timeless and impersonal relationship with nature and with being, which entails transcendence of many of the things that define individuality. We are connected to other people both by participation in political institutions and in the more spiritual or intuitive ways that are of particular interest to Mesiti.

After this, children are seen making plastic toys, and the sound of the plastic leads into another musical performance by a santur, a sort of Persian dulcimer. What they are making is at first obscure, although we later realise they are little plastic helicopters with coloured LED lights, which are propelled into the air by slingshots, and float down as bright glowing objects in the night sky.

A little research online revealed they are known in America as Rocket Copters – “the amazing slingshot LED helicopters” – and can be ordered on Amazon and no doubt elsewhere, although the ones used in the film, as I later learnt, were bought from street vendors in Rome. In one of the last scenes in the film, children fire these slingshots into the sky around the ruins of what appears to be an ancient tower, in reality the Tor de’ Schiavi, a medieval fortified structure built over a part of the ancient palace of the 3rd-century Roman Gordian emperors, a thousand years earlier.

Firing lights into the sky – akin to fireworks of course – recalls the many associations of nocturnal fire with religious and spiritual ceremonies, including the use of torches at the Eleusinian Mysteries or the horseback torch race evoked in the opening pages of Plato’s Republic. Here too there is a mystical and ecstatic quality in the play of coloured lights in the night sky surrounding an evocative ruin with its Roman imperial associations.

The falling lights also bring us back to Malouf, echoing the poem’s reference to the grieving angels in Giotto’s Lamentation in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua as “tear-stained kamikaze angels”, although they are cited in the text mainly as a comparison for the humming birds that “sorrow, having learnt / their name in a dead language”. This ecstatic scene of firing lights into the night sky feels like a conclusion, but the film actually ends with a view of the interior of the Senate chamber in Rome, and particularly lingers on the huge fresco of Cicero denouncing Catiline (1880) by Cesare Maccari. The choice of subject for this location is of course not fortuitous, but highly significant, and refers to one of the most important moments in the history of the Senate in the last years of the Republic.

Catiline was a young aristocrat who had planned a coup to overthrow the Republic and take over the state in his own interests (63BC); the story is recounted in Sallust’s Conspiracy of Catiline. His plot was uncovered and revealed by the great orator Cicero, consul in that year, who denounced him in a series of extraordinary speeches delivered within the Senate House, which survive today and are still studied as models of political rhetoric.

In the painting, we see Catiline sitting isolated in one corner while Cicero speaks, as he is described in the First Catilinarian. In the end, Catiline fled Rome after the first of the four orations. The story illustrates the power of the word in the hands of a great speaker, but in this case also reminds us the experience of ecstatic communion does not entirely free us from the more mundane realities and problems of the political.