About
10,000 Years IX, Fruit Body
Sista Pratesi ushers me into her latest construction: a grey, boat-like, bed-like, stasis pod. Unlike my previous experiences in Pratesi’s installations,this one’s precise nature remains undefined–a new abstraction of the typical, recognisable modes of transport she has been building for audiences to view her 10,000 Years series. Thus far, Pratesi has invited viewers, one at a time, to take a seat in her constructs of a train, a plane, a limousine, horse-cart, a hovercraft and a lift. She builds these experiences within her studio and covers them in uniform grey spandex, cocooned within heavy black drapes. The invitation to view is part of the experience of the work, becoming part performance, part film, part installation–“less a coherent scene than an unfolding situation” (Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells, 2012). Stepping through the curtain in Pratesi’s studio situates you within a carefully considered mode of compliance.
She closes the curtain behind me and I am encased in darkness. My eyes adjust and neon green grid lines reveal themselves on the floor. The floor itself falls away and becomes an abyss. I remove my shoes and get comfortable.
The video fades into being. Light from the projector catches on the black tape which covers the walls.
Gliding through a forest at night, I am a low flying drone. Green light emanates from the vehicle’s end, instantly dissolving the boundary between set and screen. Night-vision headlamps illuminate forest insects.
In Pratesi’s last work 10,000 Years VIII Snakes in a Limousine, I knew for sure I was in the backseat of a car. The projection then established the driver, an unknown male figure, and Pratesi herself as the front seat passenger. My memory of this experience is distinct. They never glanced back to face me, always facing forward at the road ahead–a road that was at different times a tunnel, an open dirt track, a tangle of hallucinatory snakes. This triple occupancy gave the work an eerie tension: we were at once three strangers in the intimate space of a car; or a family in the stubborn aftermath of an argument; or a group of friends driving fearfully into an unknown situation. These were my thoughts, none of which were directly articulated by Pratesi. The only thing I knew for certain back then was that I was a passenger and the driver was in control.
This time I do not know who, or what, is steering. The sensation is one of being caught in a science fiction tractor beam, a small shuttle drawn toward a larger ship. Or being towed across snow in a weightless sled, pulled over forest ferns and weaving between trees.
The light from the projector illuminates the presence of a large textile snake, draped over the screen and trailing onto the floor. It is yellow, I think. A hangover from my previous trip.
Digital glitches cause the forest to disappear from view, revealing an extension of my vehicle and a continuation of the gridded green lines. My brain flicks through teenage memories of watching scenes of the Star Trek holodeck perform this same trick–a revelation to some and malfunction to others. The instability of both the forest and the ‘holodeck’ images stop me from thinking this is a dream and, at the same time, tells me that I cannot trust everything I see. The trope of the holodeck malfunctioning is a common one in the Star Trek franchise. Those stories often indicate a looming threat: safety controls disengage and the technology rebels against the flesh. Pratesi’s use of the glitch is different, it feels free of danger and serves to keep you in a state of strange hypnagogia.
Two green lights now hover in the distance. Eyes that sit somewhere between the ghostly animality of Uncle Boonmee and the low-tech torches of Batteries Not Included. Or perhaps are they the headlamps of fellow passengers who, like me, find themselves drifting through the trees? I feel, somehow, like I should remember. This is not a dream, exactly, but a recollection. I question if my eyes are open or closed. The boundaries between physical existence and spiritual presence blur. It is warm in Pratesi’s studio and I am comfortable in her constructed set of wood and foam. I took my shoes off without being told to. Another glitch and then a shift. Rather than continuing my woozy forward trajectory, I start to move upwards. The trees are soon below me as a distant island appears on the horizon. I assume it’s Earth, but the rocks have a moon-like quality.
Until this point, an oscillating drone of sound had bubbled gently and deeply from the speakers. As my viewpoint is raised towards the sky, I realise that the sound has been an entanglement of vocal drones all along. Now they also rise in tone and volume. I am aware that Pratesi runs a choir. I do not know if the voices belong to them, but my gut tells me that they do. The choir is for a people without a place, finding collective strength in being the other. It’s as though the mechanism controlling my movement, the driver of the vehicle, has revealed itself.
Perhaps the sound of these voices has been the key all this time. As in the final scene of Weerasethakul’s Memoria, where the sound that has permeated the film is revealed to be the sonic boom of departing alien craft as they rise above the trees and leave Earth.
I would say things suddenly click into place—that I understand it all—but I’d be lying.
Still, something feels clearer with this knowledge. I imagine the other lights in the forest belong to similarly lost individuals seeking connection, perhaps with themselves, or with others, human and non-human alike. I expect my ascent to continue, for there to be a reveal or a sense of resolution. Instead, the voices cease and the image fades. I am back in the darkness.
After a few minutes, light re-enters as Pratesi pulls back the curtain to ask me if I’d like a chat. My brain is still catching up to where exactly I am. I ask how long the film was: “Seven minutes.” I put my shoes back on.
This bending of time is one of the aspects of Pratesi’s work that I find most effective. The other, not unrelated, is that subversion of expectations that comes between the positioning of the body in (mostly) familiar modes of transport in contrast with the films themselves, which she describes as “intuitive expressions, free of narrative or agenda.” The transport constructs are grey, imperfect facsimiles but their effect on the body is immediate. We sit within them how we are expected to sit, we are compliant. In Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher asserts that our immersion in dominant systems is so complete that we follow their logics even when they become surreal or self-defeating. Pratesi challenges these systems subtly with her uncanny structures and the imagery we see unfold ahead of us twists the body’s compliance. The train does not stay on the track; the limousine does not stick to the road. Instead, through Pratesi’s hallucinations, the viewer is offered some escape. Some time to feel, rather than think; to question compliance and collectivity, rules and permissions. It’s telling, perhaps, that where the quality of the vehicle was more ambiguous, I instinctively removed my shoes. The codified behaviours were less apparent. I didn’t quite know how to sit. I didn’t know if I was steering or being steered. I had to settle and surrender in a different way.
After a period of time, Pratesi deconstructs her installations, only to then reconstruct them in miniature. These maquettes serve as records of the vehicles; miniaturised as if by a shrink-ray. But what of the films themselves? Outside of the experience, they dissipate, becoming the half-remembered dreams of those of us fortunate enough to have experienced them. In this sense, Pratesi’s practice resists easy documentation or circulation. It privileges embodied memory over image retention, presence over proof. In the current context of frictionless consumption, what Pratesi builds instead is a private, dissonant encounter. Her works return in fragments, in sensations, in the subtle shifts they provoke in how we sit, listen and remember.
Sista Pratesi is an artist working with multimedia installations. Self-constructed forms of transportation, from the literal to the more abstract, become sites of ‘safe escapism’ in which the artist and audience are able to feel both in and out of control. Pratesi’s installations evoke the experience of playing video games or riding simulators, in which expansive worlds can be explored from the comfortable confines of familiar interior spaces. Her works consider the borders between the real and the imagined; the familiar and the strange; expectations and realities.
Sam Williams 2025