On inventing new rituals - a response to Mesitis’ The Rites of When (2024).

This is what the artist does

Preface: Read here about Angelica Mesiti’s: The Rites of When (2024) and here.

Photograph: Sally Leaney. I have decided not to use an image of the actual artwork here due to copyright.

This is what the artist does.

An almost delicious stench of oil. Eternal screens flank the outer walls of the thickest darkest space. Those screens stand in for all the information of the world in all its ancient existence - that ancient existence that we sometimes (rarely?) feel. It plucks directly at the cells in my own body.

I hear that trigger, and feel that sound - I know what that is…I think. The dances, singing, sound, and the stars reach up, and up and up. Yet this energy, this beat, this swirl of colour, light and sound is cut, and keeps being cut. It is fractured by the tallest concrete pylons, the visitors who take up my seat (I want that seat!), and, of course, by the pungent petrol and eternal dark. This is what the artist does. She forces me to move throughout her space. And that is how it is meant to be I am sure - I am meant to reach, to never quite grasp. I know these people, I know their dances (do I?), and in awe I wait while it grasps me - it grasps me. I hang, I float, I swirl, suspended by magic.

Of course I have forgotten the rituals of the seasons, the seasons I am meant to know (what seasons? Where do I exist?). Of course I have forgotten fire (oh, my connection to fire! The seasons have burnt because of people like me).

The artist triggers all. This is what the artist does. She screams seven. Seven screens, seven sisters of the pleiades. A beginning, an end. No beginning…and no end. She wears my headdress - I’ve worn that in my dreams - the ancient ladies I paint on canvas all wear it. The crown of my longest days and my longest nights. Particles. The stars are the cosmos, the sparks are the fire. A single sound, a collective storm of energy that moves through the body. Particles, particles, particles: Distant pasts, presents, futures of the cosmos, of eternity. God.

My past. My future. My most elemental (now). My connection with the world - all whose hands I hold (I don’t hold - it’s been a long time). Why can’t I dance like that? Why can’t I succumb to the air, the skies, the sounds, the elements that take me riding on winds of time. Have you ever waved your arms, lifted your head to the heavens, closed your eyes, tapped your feet, moved with the others and sung? Does the soil hold your toes? Does the dark hold you?

In the time I stayed, I was never dwarfed - I was there. Tiny, little me, in a cavernous oily space - I grew so large I was eternal. Like them.
I was never in a purely technological space, my experience was never driven by flattened screen forms - I was present. And this is what the artist does.

I see. I can’t see. I see again, but differently. Eternally. This is what the artist does.

I am reminded of magic. But I can’t move. We don’t hold hands here - we watch. The stars are far, the dance is too. We dream that this is what we might be able to do one day - to touch, to find a new ritual.

It’s all changing too fast - the smoke stacks of heaviness of the contemporary world keep my hands by my side, and make me do what I have done (burnt, eaten, eaten, eaten, and spewed, until there is nothing left).

But what if I reach that far back? What will happen then? This is what the artist does - she makes me want to. She makes me want to reach far - to fear, and dream, and sing-cry, and dance. The energy of our hands making rain together, with each other. She has done this. You have me here - you have me here, and it repeats.