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.
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.
Simultaneously, the song relates to wetlands, swamps, bogs and fens, and how their historic and ongoing drainage threatens ecotones, wildlife, wetland cultures and spirits. 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.
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.
Credits:
Direction + Edit: Venus Jasper
Camera: Ryan W. Wight
Photography: Nina Maria Allmoslechner
Hair + Make-up: Liisi Kõuhkna
Costume: Venus Jasper + Peachy Clam (co-production)
Thank you:
SÍM Residency Reykjavik,
LungA Festival Seyðisfjörður
Rupert Vilnius
Made possible by:
Mondriaan Fund
AFK Amsterdam
Amarte Fund