Reading Group with Jesse Jones: ‘Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation’ by Silvia Federici

Jesse Jones is a Dublin-based artist. Her practice crosses the media of film, performance and installation. Often working through collaborative structures, she explores how historical instances of communal culture may hold resonance in our current social and political experiences. Jones’ practice is multi-platform, working in film installation, performance and sculpture. Her recent work proposes a re-imagining of the relationship between the Law and the body through speculative feminism.  Using a form of expanded cinema she explores magical counter-narratives to the State drawn from suppressed archetypes and myth. She represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale 2017 with the project " Tremble Tremble" who's title is inspired by the 1970s Italian wages for housework movement, during which women chanted “Tremate, tremate, le streghe sono tornate! (Tremble, tremble, the witches have returned!)”. Jones’ new work emerges from a rising social movement in Ireland which calls for a transformation of the historic relationship between the church and the state.  

Image: Tremble Tremble, 2017, Jesse Jones