Jesse Jones: Tremble Tremble

Jesse Jones threw a spotlight on feminism and women’s issues with her work Tremble Tremble when she represented Ireland at the 57th Venice Biennale / La Biennale di Venezia in 2017. Since then the political landscape has changed dramatically, with calls for change echoing around the world. In the wake of #MeToo, #IBelieveHer, revelations about the gender pay gap, and in the year that that saw Irish citizens go to the polls for an historic referendum vote, Jesse Jones returns to Dublin with the Irish premiere of this timely work. Jones will transform Project’s Space Upstairs into a multi-media installation which re-imagines feminist history and law, presenting an artwork she describes as a “bewitching” of the judicial system.

The 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’ work emerges from a rising social movement in Ireland which calls for a transformation of the historic relationship between the church and the state. In this time of change, Jesse Jones returns to the witch as a feminist archetype and disrupter who has the potential to transform reality. Tremble Tremble imagines a different legal order, one in which the multitude are bought together in a symbolic, gigantic body, to proclaim a new law, that of In Utera Gigantae.

Based in Dublin, Jesse Jones has been researching the ways in which the law transmits memory between generations and over time. Her research weaves between an archaeological dig of a 3.5 million year old female specimen, to the suppressed voices of the witch trials of 16th century Europe, the symphysiotomy trials, and abortion legislation in Ireland today. The new world order to be found in Tremble Tremble churns testimony, court statements and song into a towering bodily incantation.

In conjunction with the exhibition Project Arts Centre will run a series of artist talks with Jesse Jones, find out more here.

Tremble Tremble is a collaboration with theatre artist Olwen Fouéré, sound artist Susan Stenger and commissioner and curator Tessa Giblin, Director of Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh. It was originally commissioned for the Pavilion of Ireland of the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), and produced with Project Arts Centre.