The Swiss Church London presents ‘The 13th Zodiac’, a multimedia installation and live performance by long-time collaborators and 2024 residency recipients, John Costi and Rhett Nicholl, AKA ‘EvilTwin’. They invite the audience to explore the intersections of art, trauma and healing, rewriting narratives of complex, toxic masculinity and scrutinising wider systems of societal oppression, including class and criminal justice systems.

The title references both artists’ birthdays, which fall under Ophiuchus, the rarely acknowledged 13th sign of the Zodiac. Also known as the serpent bearer, a god of medicine and so adept in the art of healing, he could return souls from the underworld. This ability was learned from a snake on the river Styx, the main river leading to Hades.

These are fitting themes for Costi and Nicholl, whose personal journeys have involved battling addiction, navigating prison and seeking redemption through art.

The multimedia installation, including a film and accompanying performances, traces a spiritual journey of surrender and transcendence, with elements drawn from the 12-step recovery model, the Zodiac, and pantheistic traditions. The film’s protagonist, ‘E.T,’ embodies the struggles and dualities that both artists have faced.

In a quest to find himself and ‘reset the zodiac’, E.T speeds through interdimensional spaces, meeting mythical characters along the way. He confronts past trauma, including a powerful scene set in a North London council estate where Costi experienced a life-altering sexual assault.

By reclaiming the location as a “Museum of Injury”, the artists turn pain into a poignant symbol of healing.

The film and accompanying score are shown with a tunnel-like installation featuring ‘patchwork blackout blinds’, representing inherited realities and ancestral wounds.

EvilTwin have adopted London’s transport networks as tributaries of the river Styx, enlisted actors and musicians with lived experience and drawn on their professional roles in social health care for the presentation that includes printmaking, sculpture, restricted legal documents, family artefacts and archival materials, alongside the immersive installation, performance and film.

EvilTwin’s residency at the Swiss Church culminates in a 4-day showcase featuring live musical and theatrical performances that utilise the Swiss Church’s unique architecture and acoustics.

TW: Drug use & sexual violence 
* Please note: This exhibition references to topics that some attendees may find triggering.

John Costi

Born after a spiritual awakening during a 6-year sentence for armed robbery, Costi’s practice accesses inherited versions of ‘masculinity’ and criminal sub-culture. Through lived experience, he scrutinises class and the justice system to make sense of his past. Preserving real life to occupy art settings, the gallery acting as support group or showroom, experience and emotion are the charging forces. Social work is at the core. Costi also heads crime diversion groups in probations and prisons.

He is interested in dismantling hierarchies of art experience, turning passive audiences into active participants. Often improvised and informed by chance, Costi creates sculptures, installations, paintings and performances. The fallout forms maps of life, as art, the trails of destruction, or fruitful adventure, all to keep a mission firmly in place.

‘I make art to transport me, literally and metaphorically. Art has changed my surroundings externally, as well as my internal beliefs and blocks. It’s saved my life in doing so, providing me a golden ticket out of a past life, a privilege most do not have where I come from.’ – John Costi

Website

Rhett Nicholl

Having spent almost two decades in a cycle of chaotic addiction and offending, Nicholl spent the last four signed to RCA Records, writing, recording and producing music and music videos. He has subsequently transitioned to a vocation in health and social care. Nicholl is now a support worker at a complex needs supported accommodation for people experiencing homelessness. He is also studying to be a counsellor specialising in substance use disorders with an emphasis on the integration of the arts into psychosocial treatment modalities.

Website