Angel­i­ca Mesiti
Tossed by Waves

‘Tossed by Waves’ trans­forms Anna Schwartz Gallery into a liv­ing space where sculp­tures emit dis­tress sig­nals and a video calls atten­tion to pre­car­i­ous democracy.

For over a decade, Angel­i­ca Mesiti’s oeu­vre has inves­ti­gat­ed non-ver­bal and endan­gered forms of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Her most recent project engages with the dis­used lan­guage of Morse code, once par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful in moments of cri­sis. Mesiti’s seem­ing­ly innocu­ous hang­ing sculp­tures are com­prised of dots and dash­es enabling them to per­form Morse code mes­sages, such as SOS.

The sin­gle-chan­nel video Tossed by Waves, 2017 is marked by silence and lan­guorous trav­el­ling move­ments. The cam­era cap­tures an ambigu­ous pro­ces­sion of sculp­tur­al bod­ies, entan­gled and clamped onto a stone trunk. The mon­u­ment is nev­er quite revealed, yet clues, such as graf­fi­ti bear­ing the names of loved ones and mes­sages of hope, sug­gest the present time.

This is Mesiti’s med­i­ta­tion on tur­bu­lence and resilience from the per­spec­tive of her adopt­ed city of Paris, whose mot­to: fluc­tu­at nec mer­gi­tur trans­lates as ​“tossed by the waves but does not sink.” In use since the mid-1300s, the phrase has gained a resur­gence of pop­u­lar­i­ty with the Novem­ber Paris attacks in 2015. Over the past two years, Mesi­ti has engaged with the Place de la République as a place of mem­o­ry, protest, and per­haps fore­most as a con­tem­po­rary ago­ra; the sym­bol­ic heart of a city stand­ing for its demo­c­ra­t­ic values.