Daniel Jewesbury : Temple of Hercules

Temple of Hercules, work in progress. Rough edit.
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This is a rough, illustrative edit of the project Temple of Hercules. It is in standard definition and the footage is ungraded.

The footage for Temple of Hercules was shot during a residency in Celje, Slovenia in 2009, but it was not presented publicly until its live performance in 2026. In this film I worked with layering and montage, focusing on the contrast between the regular, repeated geometric forms of the city, and natural forms in the countryside just outside: flowers and fruit, paths through long grass. On the hills above the city, these forms came together in a ruined Roman temple.

I subsequently wrote the voiceover and recorded it in a number of acoustic environments in Belfast. It is spoken in the edit shown here by artist Helen Sharp. The text is a poetic reflection on the ease of disappearing in a city, of becoming invisible. This is not any kind of dramatic gesture, says the voice. On the contrary, it&rsqo;s the easiest decision one could take. Most people do not allow themselves to entertain it, it&rsqo;s so simple.

How many times I felt it dawning on me that I could just stop, wherever I was, sit down, stop going anywhere, just sit down, and disappear. Just like that. Just become invisible.

The original film was accompanied just with the ambient soundtrack recorded in Celje and the voiceover. In 2015, I added processed sound by Stuart Watson. This was not, however, the intended final form of the work.

In 2026, a full performance of the piece was presented, from a new 2K transfer of the original 16mm negative. It was included as a programme event in connection with my Death of Venus solo exhibition at Röda Sten Konsthall in Gothenburg. In this first public version, all the elements were performed live: the voiceover was spoken by actor Kristina Brändén Whitaker, and a live musical accompaniment was developed and performed by artist and musician Jesper Norda, and, crucially, all the video clips were arranged as loops, in sequences that were cued and mixed live using specialist software. I previously developed this method to provide the video scenography for the opera I Burn For You (2012-2014^rpar;, a collaboration with composer Ian Wilson that was commissioned by Aldeburgh Music, and also for another recent project, Sånger från Svartsten, a collaboration with Klezmer trio Kv. Arken and composer Mats Edén) that was commissioned by Malmö Stad.

The musical accompaniment uses the chord structure of Arvo Pärt’s Fratres as a starting point, and Jesper processed and layered these chords to create an instrument bank of chordal sequences that can be cued at specific points in the performance of the film.

In the edit shown here, the video loop is 10 minutes in length. The performance was around 16 minutes.