PRESENTATION:Angelica Mesiti-Reverb

Angelica Mesiti’s film works and spatial installations offer an experience of performative practices: sound, movement and gesture function as forms of nonverbal communication, generating resonances between people, places and cultural practices. In this way, the exhibition title refers not only to acoustic reverberation, but also to the way ideas and information travel across space and time, continuing to echo and exert influence.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Museum Tinguely Archive

In an era shaped by digital media, Angelica Mesiti’s solo exhibition “Reverb” draws attention to alternative forms of human communication. In the Museum Tinguely the artist presents five video works – some of them large-scale installations that illustrate the poetry of the everyday and show how cultural traditions, rituals, music and sound shape identity and foster community.

With her most recent work, the 7-channel video installation “The Rites of When” (2024), Mesiti draws on a long tradition of musical tributes to the changing seasons while reimagining social rituals. The work takes as its starting point ancient customs shaped by nature’s cycles – traditions often closely linked to knowledge of the stars and the movements of the sun and moon, which once structured both agricultural life and spiritual practices. The immersive installation draws inspiration from the Nebra sky disc, a 3,600-year-old artefact that may have served as an agricultural calendar and reflects the cyclic nature of seasonal changes. Seven screens represent the primary stars of the Pleiades, a constellation central to numerous myths that testify to humanity’s enduring connection with the natural world. The video work itself is divided into two acts dedicated to the winter and summer solstices, representing the cycle of the year. Choreographies, vocal choirs, collective sound-making and electronic composition combine to explore what rituals might mean in an ecologically uncertain future. Against the backdrop of climate crisis and increasing urban isolation, “The Rites of When” proposes a sensory space for reconnecting with one another and with nature. The work underscores the power of communal dancing as an expression of collective energy over the centuries

“A Hundred Years” (2020) is a quiet meditation on the traces left by war on both landscapes and memory. On the battlefields of the Somme in France, the film follows the rhythm of the seasons – from winter to spring, summer and autumn. A century after World War I, nature has reclaimed the land, but craters, trenches and a single surviving tree remain as silent witnesses. The scene centres on musician Julien Desailly walking in endless circles within the Lochnagar Crater – formed by a mine explosion on 1 July 1916, the beginning of the Battle of the Somme and one of the bloodiest days of the war. Desailly plays a requiem for the fallen on a tin whistle. This traditional Irish flute, once carried by soldiers, lends the work a particular intimacy. Free of heroism or nationalism, Mesiti draws attention to the ecological consequences of warfare, to the persistence of cultural memory, and to the possibility of renewal over time

In “Sidereal” (2024) two dancers are suspended from above, slowly revolving around one an-other. Between gravity and weightlessness, their choreography recalls the movement of celestial bodies or satellites, their interaction sometimes a struggle, sometimes harmonious – a re-flection on interpersonal relationships as well as cosmic forces. The work refers to sidereal time, an astronomical timescale based on the earth’s rotation in relation to stars rather than the sun. A crepuscular background, shifting in color like the changing light of day, plus a minimal sound composition, create a sensory space between Earth and outer space.

“Relay League” (2017) is based on the final message sent in morse code by the French Navy in 1997, marking its transition to digital communications: «Calling all. This is our last cry before our eternal silence». Inspired by the poetic phrasing, Mesiti created a three-part video work that traces the transformation of a message across different forms. At Museum Tinguely, the work is expanded via a window installation that functions like a relay league: a chain of stations serving to transmit a message. The characteristic dots and dashes of Morse code appear as transparent elements on the glass, carrying the encrypted information across the architectural threshold. In the first video, percussionist Uriel Barthelemi translates the sequence of signals into a drum composition. In the second part, dancer Filipe Laurenȩo interprets this rhythm through cho-reography. In the third, dancer Emilia Wibron Vesterlund conveys the sequence of moves toher visually impaired partner, Sindri Runudde, by touch and guided gestures. Through this chain of translation – from signal to sound  to movement to tactile communication – the work is a poetic reflection on the ways communication is changing and underscores the enduring importance of physical human contact in the digital age.

“Prepared Piano for Movers (Haussmann)” (2012) shows two movers in Paris carrying a grand piano up six flights of stairs. Even in the post-industrial age, such a task depends entirely on human labour. Presented on a loop, the video never reaches a narrative conclusion: the mov-ers never reach their destination. As a result, their physical exertion becomes choreography, in which every movement is executed with precision, their coordination a performance grounded in rehearsed interplay. The soundtrack is a chance-based composition – inspired by John Cage, the piano was prepared with objects placed inside that create unpredictable percussive sounds with every movement. The result is an accidental musical composition generated by labour itself, revealing the grace of everyday events.

Photo: Angelica Mesiti, The Rites of When (video still),  2024, 7-channel HD video installation, colour, carpet, stainless steel, 5.1 surround sound, 34 min. © 2026 ProLitteris, Zürich; Copyright the artist, Courtesy the artist, Galerie Allen, Paris, and Anna Schwartz Projects, Melbourne. Commissioned by the Art Gallery of New South Wales

Info: Curator: Tabea Panizzi, Assistant Curator: Maya Jung, Museum Tinguely, Paul Sacher-Anlage 1, Basel, Switzerland, Duration: 18/3-30/8/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.tinguely.ch/