ASSEMBLY is Angelica Mesiti’s three-channel video installation. The work is 25 minutes long and situated in a large room with red carpet. Within the room a shallow circle of steps is sunk into the ground. A short corridor just behind this wall leads to the entrance.
Mesiti describes ASSEMBLY as primarily experiential, where the audience can let the work wash over them. She wanted to create a space for the audience where through an emotional response to the work ideas could emerge.
The symbolism in the work comes through the use of certain musical tropes: Polyphony/Cacophony – the idea of multiple sound identities clashing together and Harmony – an agreement of different sounds to a pleasing affect. Mesiti is using these to explore the way we as members of a society clash and harmonise.
The film begins in a parliamentary setting with the Michela machine, invented by Antonio Michela Zucco in 1863 and first used in the Italian senate. This device, also known as a Stenotype, looks like a small piano keyboard but works like a typewriter. The design was to ensure clarity within the democratic process. It came from the idea of music as a universal language and how this machine could help us communicate in a universal way.
Within the opening moments of ASSEMBLY we see a stenographer, someone trained in using a stenotype machine, typing a poem. This is David Malouf’s poem To Be Written in Another Tongue. This poem speaks about the limits of translation and the limits of speaking to ancestors whom you no longer share a common language. The keys used by the stenographer to type this poem are translated into musical notes, and it’s the interpretation of this musical notation we hear performed in ASSEMBLY.
To begin with the music is faithfully performed with a classical interpretation by musicians playing the viola, piano and clarinet. Gradually instruments and musicians from outside the western tradition overplay and interact with the score using their own interpretation and improvisation. The film builds to a climatic point, Mesiti describes this crescendo as a necessary anarchic moment from which new things can emerge. This then lapses back into a calmer moment of choral singing, a utopian harmonic moment.
When we take our seats within ASSEMBLY’s amphitheatre, we share a moment of our own ‘assembly’ within the gallery space. We are reminded of our collective power and responsibility to effect change, to bring our voices together for our own and each other’s good.
There is an audio description available to listen to alongside ASSEMBLY, please ask a member of staff if you need any assistance accessing this.
