Jesse Jones’ commissioned 16mm film The Spectre and the Sphere evokes the spectres of ideology and amplifies residual voices that haunt the cultural vessels of history. It examines how the spaces of our popular imagining such as the theatre and the cinema are also containers of historical and political impulses. The Spectre and the Sphere conjures up a particular moment in the early twentieth century through the use of cultural artefacts, imagining the various historical potentialities of the time, and how these residues may be present in our construction of the future.

 

Jones’s adapts the text from Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto as its script performer by a whispering choir. The twelve-minute film, commissioned by Project Arts Centre in 2008 it was Tessa Giblin and Jesse Jones’s first collaborating project. Shot in the historic Vooruit theatre in Ghent, Belgium (where the Internationale was composed), the film simultaneously conjures up cultural and political histories as a means of reflecting upon contemporary political imaginings and asks was there another future possible.

​