Tremble Tremble

Edited by Tessa Giblin, with texts from Silvia Federici, Tessa Giblin, Lisa Godson, and Tina Kinsella.

Combining Brechtian theater techniques of estrangement with elements drawn from pop music and cinema, the Dublin-based artist Jesse Jones creates films and performances that refer to historical instances of communal culture yet resonate with contemporary life and politics. The publication accompanying the Pavilion of Ireland at the 2017 Venice Biennale borrows its title—Tremble Tremble—from the 1970s Italian “Wages for Housework” campaign, during which women chanted “Tremate tremate, le streghe sono tornate!” (Tremble, tremble, the witches have returned!). “Drawing on this movement,” writes the pavilion’s curator, Tessa Giblin, “Jones conflates the memory of the witch hysteria with the oppression of women and their reduction to the status of unpaid domestic laborers. She restores the witch as a feminist archetype, a disrupter who possesses the potential to transform reality.” Tremble, tremble, the witches have returned!