The White Cave
A film created by Jesse Jones
Stephanie Lamprea, performer

On display at the Singapore Biennale 31 October 2025 - 29 March 2026
Exhibition information here

The White Cave draws upon currents of hydrofeminism and prehistoric ecofeminism to imagine the sea as an ancient archive of transformation, where women's voices and bodies move through cycles of immersion, dissolution and renewal. Expanding on Jesse Jones's exploration of the witch archetype, the film turns to a prehistory of the figure through sculptural, smouldering sibyls embedded in the cave walls. These forms recall the oracle caves of Delphi, where female prophecy once served as political navigation, warning and divination. Here, they exhale warning in whispers and tongues, their voices threaded through the score to suggest more-than-human consciousness and an architectural animism of the cave.

At its centre is Enheduanna (2285–2250 BCE), the Sumerian high priestess, poet, and the first named author in recorded history. Set within a salt therapy cave, Colombian-American soprano Stephanie Lamprea's voice carries Enheduanna's "Temple Hymns to Inanna," interwoven with the libidinal poetics of Federico García Lorca's "Conch," tracing the sea as a site of eros, sensuousness and metamorphosis. These invocations form a lineage of voices between Lamprea and her mother, Maria Cristina Lamprea Barrera, through this intergenerational intimacy and embodied presence, echoing across the cave's chambers. Oyster shells recur as sculptural forms. They recall prehistoric middens found in coastal caves worldwide–early sites of gathering, sustenance and symbolic practice. In Jones's work, the oyster becomes more than a relic: it is a vessel binding sea to body, consumption to memory and ritual to resistance.

This poetics of the shell is deepened through an exploration of Conchylomania, the 17th-century European obsession with shells that spread through cabinets of curiosity, botanical illustrations and colonial collecting. Fuelled by expeditions to Asia and Southeast Asia, including Malaysia and Singapore, the shell became a fetish object of desire and conquest. In Dutch still lifes, such as those by Balthasar van der Ast, rare shells appear among flowers and fruit, staging empire within the domestic interior; the mania later fed Rococo's racaille, derived from marine curvature. The White Cave reframes this legacy: the shell is no longer a token of extraction but a charged threshold where desire, ritual and feminist resistance converge.

Artwork description provided by Jesse Jones.

​Credits
Creator and director: Jesse Jones
Vocals and acting: Stephanie Lamprea
Additional spoken word: Maria Cristina Lamprea Barrera
Director of photography: Emma Dalesman
Film score: Stephanie Lamprea, Alistair MacDonald, Erin Thomson
Editing: Michael Higgins
Choreography: Junk Ensemble
Costume: Alison Conneely
Hair & makeup: Natalie Kinsella
Vocal massage support for Stephanie: Andrew Keay, Ark Massage Therapy Sound engineer for Maria: Jonathan Estabrooks
Producer: Jodie Fearon
​Photo Stills: Mark Duggan