2020
3D video, colour, sound, 11 min

The Jester and Death is an animated film in which the Jester, Béna’s avatar, wanders
through Bunhill Fields in London, a cemetery formerly located on the edge of the city, where
non-conformists, radicals and dissidents were buried from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Among the graves are those of John Bunyan, author of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, and the pre-romantic poet and artist William Blake, who accompanies the Jester on his walk through the neo-Gothic burial ground. Further companions are a fly and a snail, which materialise as glass sculptures in the artist’s installation. They quickly draw the Jester into a game of ‘guess who?’, while the poet, his face obscured by a wolf, recites his poems (including the famous The Fly from 1794). The video ends with a drift race 2 as part of which the Jester competes against his double, culminating in a final showdown in which their customised vehicles collide head-on and go up in smoke. An absurd ending or a filmic answer to the ‘unsolvable’ riddle the Jester
is asked to solve during this nocturnal walk among tombstones?

Art direction: Sybil Montet
Sound design: Simon Kounovsky

Supported by La Fondation des Artistes and produced by Julie Béna for Kunstraum, London, as part of the exhibition The Jester and Death, co-curated by Thomas Cuckle and Hannah Conroy.