Angelica Mesiti

The Calling

Angelica Mesiti’s piece, The Calling is a poignant exploration of ancient human traditions evolving and adapting to the modern world. The three-channel work focuses on traditional whistling languages. It shows the communities of the village of Kuskoy in Northern Turkey, the island of La Gomera in the Canary Islands, and the island of Evia, Greece, where such languages are all still in use. For these communities, whistling languages are in a process of transformation from their traditional use as tools for communication across vast lands into tourist attractions and cultural artifacts and are being taught to local school children. Edited to evoke the particularities of this mode of communication and its place in daily life, the work shows each community in close-up detail as well as in long shots that describe the distance over which their whistling must carry. Subtitles in the native languages and English allow understanding, but the intrusion of other noises is analogous to how the language is now less commonly heard. The three channels are projected at a large scale in a dark space, drawing on the conventions of cinema presentation but expanding this to become a more physical experience, seeking to engage the viewer in an experience beyond the audiovisual.