Juliet Jacques

Juliet Jacques
You Will Be Free, 2017
Single channel video, colour, sound, 10΄ 13΄΄
Courtesy of the artist and Studio Voltaire, London

“Fortunately, I am not the first person to tell you that you will never die”, wrote American author and actress Cookie Mueller to her terminally ill husband, cartoonist Vittorio Scarpati, in 1989. “You simply lose your body. You will be the same, except you won’t have to worry about rent or mortgage or fashionable clothes.” They died a few weeks apart in 1989, of AIDS-related complications. Towards the end, when they could no longer speak, they communicated exclusively through drawings and texts. You Will be Free is based on a monologue by Mueller, addressed to her husband at the end of their lives. Juliet Jacques goes back to the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, when taboos and social exclusion prevailed, and the Anglo-American political response. Using archive footage from the 1980s, from the queer musical City of Lost Souls (1983), the Alternative Miss World competition, as well as newspaper covers, photographs and computer games, Jacques explores the boundaries of the body and of love, memory, the biopolitics of the community and of illness that imbued sex with fear.

Jacques’ script, beautifully narrated by Anna-Louise Plowman, asks questions about what it means to have a body, whether it might be a prison, and how we might be remembered after death. What happens to love when the possibility of physical intimacy disappears forever? Do other types of love – for a community, for the world, even – become more important, and more necessary to express?

Biography

Juliet Jacques is a writer and filmmaker based in London. Jacques has published four books including: Rayner Heppenstall: A Critical Study (Dalkey Archive, 2007, Trans: A Memoir (Verso, 2015) for which she was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the Polari LGBT Literary Salon’s First Book Prize Award, and Front Lines: Trans Journalism 2007-2021 (Cipher Press, 2022). She has also contributed to volumes published by Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and others. Her short fiction, essays and criticism have appeared in the London Review of Books, Granta, Sight & Sound, Frieze, Art Review, New York Times, The Washington Post, TimeOut, the New Humanist, The New Statesman, and many other places. In 2019, she was chosen as one of ten British LGBT+ writers for the British Council’s International Literary Showcase. In 2021 she published her debut short story collection, Variations, with Influx Press. Films include Approach/Withdraw (2016), co-directed with artist Ker Wallwork, and the documentary Revivification: Art, Activism and Politics in Ukraine (2018). She co-wrote NADA: Act III and The Gift with Jasmina Cibic, and acted in Female Human Animal (Josh Appignanesi, 2017) and the Superflux short film Our Friends Electric (2017).

https://julietjacques.com

 

 

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