Jesse Jones
Tobacco Warehouse 1 & 2

Born in 1978, Dublin. Lives in Dublin.

By annexing forms of popular culture, Jesse Jones tries to re-establish a collective social space that responds to the ongoing depletion of the public sphere. Besides focusing on contemporary experiences of oppression and resistance, the concerns of her films are historical. Jones is particularly interested in the cinematic space, as well as in the question of how it can become a point of convergence.
For Mahogany (2009), Jones re-scripted the final scene of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's 1927 opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. It tells the story of a city outside of society, whose inhabitants are offered a space of 'infinite freedom' as long as they pay enough money. This freedom manifests itself in an excessive indulgence of pleasures. Mahogany, shot in the Australian outback, restages this fictitious city in the wake of its collapse, as a dialogue between the city's architect Begbick, and a Whisper Choir made up of its inhabitants. With the suspension of time, and setting the action in the void of the desert, the video takes the allegorical geographical location and historical moment as a starting point for a critique of present political conditions. Whilst Brecht intended Mahagonny to be a criticism of the false freedoms of the Weimar Republic, Jesse Jones tests the marginality of political gesture and the crisis of forms of viable political action in contemporary post-utopian society.