Mesiti said the three channel video and installation piece was inspired by a machine: the Michela machine, a 19th century stenographic instrument which is modelled on a piano keyboard and used in the Italian Senate for official parliamentary reporting.
The machine’s inventor, Antonio Michela Zucco, was originally inspired by musical notation as a universal language.
Mesiti came across this instrument while in a flea market in Rome, and after being enlightened on its usage by her lawyer companion, she began to think about the machine and its relation to both democracy, and music.
“This little machine has been witness to the democratic process for over a century,” Mesiti said.
“So many historical events have passed over the keys of this little machine; it has recorded every utterance in the parliamentary process, and I thought, what a timely little device to be thinking about, as we’re considering the state democracy is in right now.”
It was 2017, and Mesiti said that the world seemed to be in crisis mode.
The machine was the starting point for an idea, which strives for a sense of community within a fractured post-modern world.
Mesiti wondered: “What if we could translate a text via this machine and transform it into a musical score, by which an ensemble of musicians could participate in the performance of this score?”
She used the device to code David Malouf’s poem To be Written in Another Tongue, which describes a yearning for connection with an ancestral tongue, the impossibility of translation, and the distance between one language and another.
The poem was then arranged into a musical score by composer Max Lyandvert.
This score is played by an ensemble of diverse musicians and performers, who represent the multitude of ancestries present in cosmopolitan Australia.
The performers gather, disassemble and reunite, to embrace solidarity in community.
“Through both the metaphor of translation and the act itself, I am exploring the very human and increasingly urgent need we have to assemble in a physical way, in a physical space, in these complex times,” Mesiti said.
For Mesiti, translation of codes into non-linguistic languages such as music or dance, provides an expansion of meaning, and a possibility of personal connection through the elaboration of the hidden.
Central to the performative video piece are the musical notions of “polyphony” and “cacophony”.
Polyphony is the effect of individual voices or instruments which have their own inherent sound but which come together as one.
Cacophony is the moment of release.
“This work is about respectful listening,” Engberg said.
“It’s about opening oneself to others and joy.
“In ‘Assembly’, Angelica translates text to code, music to movement and actions to occupations to represent the way a society gathers and builds upon itself.
“It’s not about protest.
“It’s a communal gathering, and a returning to democracy.”
Mesiti was selected to represent Australia at the 58th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia by the Australia Council, from a pool of over 70 applicants.
She is one of Australia’s foremost contemporary artists, with an internationally renowned practice that combines video with performance and installation to create immersive environments that require absorption and contemplation.
A second generation Italo-Australian who now resides in Paris, Mesiti focuses on diasporic cultures, gestural communication and multi-cultural dimensions through musicality and movement.
Assembly will open in May 2019, and will be accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue that includes essays by Jennifer Higgie, Luca Arnaudo, Caleb Kelly and 2019 Australian Pavilion curator Juliana Engberg.
