Murky Murky, Little Bitch Witch

This video work is part of the ongoing research project Wetlands Worship. The work features an individual crawling on an island of kelp and passing through the blackened ocean floor on the way to land. They are wearing a customized wetsuit adorned with shells, symbols, and chains.


Images of dead fish and acidic landscapes flash over the video shot from a drone mixed with the portraiture of the CEO of one of the largest companies in the Icelandic fish industry which was notoriously linked to the fishrot scandal of 2019. The figure is seen facedown, dead, in the water.
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Shot in Iceland, the video Murky Murky, Little Bitch Witch offers critique of environmentally disruptive fishing industries for the aggrandizement of multinationals. The person washing ashore is here to tell us that the spirits of dying fish have not forgotten.


The song and visuals point to the inevitable truth that our bodies ultimately become part again of the ecosystem of the planet, through the presence and the hunger or millions of microbes and other detritivores. This turning of the wheel of life and death and their intimate relation is a theme in the recent work of Venus Jasper. No matter how much we imagine to be in control or in defiance of natural processes, the deathness or passiveness portrayed by the character, fusing as it were with the microbes of the undercroft, exemplifies how at the end of the day we are wedded intimately with decay, death, renewal, and the many many microbes that run our more-than-human world.
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Simultaneously, the song relates to wetlands, swamps, bogs and fens, and how their historic and ongoing drainage of these places, materially and metaphorically speaking, threatens ecotones, wildlife, wetland cultures and spirits.


The video Murky Murky, Little Bitch Witch, and the entire project of Wetlands Worship seeks to rekindle wetland spiritualities, lensed through a folkloric, musical and sculptural artistic research that explores the roots of the artist, growing up near the bogs and fenlands of Noord-Brabant, Netherlands.

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• The video Murky Murky, Little Bitch Witch stems on the live version of a song I performed at Vilnius, Rupert (LT).
• ‍Murky Murky, Little Bitch Witch (video) was shown at SÍM Residency, Reykjavik and University of Aarhus, Denmark in 2023. In 2024 it was shown at my Open Studio presentation, and at Green Space Miami (USA) and at Ghosts of Futures Past, Garage Rotterdam (NL).
• The video is part of the ongoing research project Wetlands Worship.
• The video is paired with high quality photography that can be shown in framed prints, collage works and for web-promotion of the project.
• More of the photography will be released soon.

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