Wetlands Worship
I am currently working on Wetlands Worship, a research project around the revival of ecological kinship with wetlands and the speculative investigation of drained wetlands and swamps, the sentiments and sediments of wetland goddesses, new rituals and musical offerings, which also entails the rekindling of lost skills and materials and critical assessment of contemporary industries and their relation with degraded, polluted and forgotten waters. The research into wetlands and swamps started after ending my first big soloshow, EARTHSHRINE, after which i felt that it was actually the wetland spaces like swamps that called me deeply since my early childhood, more so than soils.
As it unfolds, the project involves research, story and text writing, songwriting, music, video, costumes, a music record and a live show including a sculptural scenography. Wetlands Worship is a personal homecoming for my murky dark emotional feelings around climate decay and the disenfranchised world — it is a way of using my voice, my embodiment, and my art skills to step up my creative concerns for the world.
How did it start?
I started this project at Rupert, Vilnius, in 2023, where I joined the symposium 𝘌𝘈𝘙𝘛𝘏 𝘉𝘖𝘕𝘋𝘚 with the site-specific live performance OAKBallZ and EELSkin, in which I voice the anger and desolation of the wetlands and swamps that are historically and currently drained, polluted and mistreated.
For me, dirty wetlands are a symbol of the margin: the unrecognized; the slimy; the in-between; the hidden. I believe that in the industrial post-Enlightenment society, it is important to develop relationships with substances, places and qualities that cannot be clearly interpreted or 'used' for anything. In a swamps, life and death merge in a murky magic that escapes clear identification – I love this!
It is exactly this quality that I want to capture in my research, my video works, music, and the installations. In addition to the ecological and historic dimension of drainage works, it is specifically the magical and mythical relationship with wetlands that moves me and makes me speculate and re-think queer possibilities of resistance to empire.
As a first form, I created the piece OAKBallZ and EELSkin that took place within a venue-filling installation titled Murky Medicine Swamp, an installation comprised soil, branches, water, fog, fog machine, cement bricks, ants, water beetles, lichen, moss, lab equipment, stone, logs, plastics, silicone tubes, clay, spray paint, twig baskets, mushrooms, video projectors, speakers, lights. Both works were part of a 3-day program which also featured: Victoria Ivanova (Serpentine Galleries), Sofia Lemos (TBA21–Academy), Lina Martin-Chan and Calum Bowden (Trust), Aoife Fannin (Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC)), HASHIA, Jenna Sutela, Barnett Cohen and others.
I had so much fun creating the silk cape with natural dyes made of Oak gall balls, plants foraged at an Amsterdam cruising area, and rust dyes made of old discarded bike parts. I graffitied this cape-canvas with my new airbrush to create some symbols and eco-activist logos reminiscent of my drawing series. In the live ritual I gave it my all with a vocal prayer to remind us of the wetlands goddesses we once worshipped. It is inspiring me to make sculptures and investigate more materials to be crafted together.
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What was magical to hear, was that apparantly in Lithuania there folklore of the devil calling in lost people into the swamp, and in a way I was doing exactly that.
After the saga in Lithuania I went to Iceland, where I spent the month of June at the wonderful SÍM Residency, in Reykjavik. Here, I've experienced the earth shaking, as we awaited the eruption of Litli-Hrúturof, I worked on finishing the costume (co-production with Peachy Clam) and prepared for a photo and video shoot for Murky Murky, Little Bitch Witch. A audio-visual work that visualizes an industrial critique full of eco-grief in a sort of swamp-punk post-capitalocene-punkish aesthetic.
In this same travel to Iceland, I also performed the work Herring God MoanZ (Síldarguð MoanZ) at LungA Festival, in the town Seyðisfjörður on the eastern shores of Iceland, formerly known to be a capital of the fishing industries.
Music Rituals
Supported by musician Diego Manatrizio, the work Herring God MoanZ (Síldarguð MoanZ), performed in Iceland, offered an emotional and lyrical sonic space that dwells somewhere between a music concert and a shamanic ritual for a Herring and Cod Fish - a species central in several of the economic booms (and the ultimate crash) of the country.
With 150 people perched inside an old rusty fish SILO that was formerly used to ferment the bodies of 1000's of Cod-Fish, I pondered the lack of praise for this piscine source of sustenance: "Who owns the Fish? Who owns the Land?" I say, "Herring HodZ. Rust Dust - Never has there been a shrine erected," while offering homage to a dead fish inside the discontinued factory that once housed its kin. Herring God Moanz was a ritual of transformation, praise and grief.
In that same town of Seyðisfjörður, I showed a sculptural version of the work 𝘏𝘦𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘨𝘰𝘥; an installation made of stones, driftwood, building rubble, and flowers holding the hand-made wetsuit I created earlier, placed like a dead man on a grave of beach rocks, building rubble and smelly beached clam shells. The work was exhibited alongside Power Stone. It was exciting to perform and show alongside Pussy Riot, Miles Greenberg, Vidar Logi, Ada M. Patterson, Á. Birna Björnsdotti and others.
Near the end of summer 2023, I went to take part in the Earthbound symposium between Earthwise Residency and the University of Aarhus, Denmark. Here I spoke alongside of Norwegian-Sámi choreographer and dancer Katarina Skår Lisa and showed my Murky Murky video. I also visited the Moesgaard museum to get closer to the bog body presented there, and that was very special, and not just because he has the exact same hair color as me in the music video. In 2025 and 2027 I will return to this collaboration in Denmark with a workshop, talk and possible exhibition.
Boggy Refuge
After a winter spent back home in Amsterdam, dealing with the severe angst of watching a livestreamed-genocide, I took an early spring pilgrimage to Angelsey island, Wales, said to be one of the last strongholds of druids against the Roman invasion. An island that is a source of inspiration or my upcoming music record Bzz Bzz, which I recorded from end 2023 to spring 2025 and collaborated for with Rosa Ronsdorf, Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti and Franky Rosaly, amongst others.
It was intensely moving to situate myself in the Menai straight on Angelsey, the place where the crossing of paradigms between indigenous folks and the growing Empire within Europe is symbolized so powerfully. In this vision of Angelsey as a last stance against assimilation, I see similarities with the resistance against empire and fascism elsewhere today.
In May of the same year, I spent the whole month in the Everglades National Park in South Florida as part of a residency at AIRIE. Here, I explored the unique wetlands ecosystem, investigated how swamps and wetlands have been historic places of refuge against empire.
Mosquitos in Florida
During the weeks near 38°C, I created a series of ceramic objects that can function as hatching-bowls for mosquitos, a paria-species that is globally hated it seems. I presented these for an afternoon at the NEST Gallery inside the national park visitor centre, and later at the Land-Learning allumi show of the residency.
The proposal here is to create resistance in the speed and ease at which we consume contemporary visual art. To help us become part of an ecosystem with the more-than-human again, situated between the artworks, living insects and ourselves. To learn to not only stay with the trouble, but also to learn how to honor the trouble, and listen to it.
As part of this residency in Florida, I also gave and artist talk about my research followed by a Q&A at Green Space Miami, hosted by Lee Pivnik of the Institute of Queer Ecology.
Back in the Netherlands, some of the Mosquito Bowls found their way in the new installation Mire of Melusine, a work which I showed at Ghosts of Futures Past, Garage Rotterdam (NL) alongside of works by Sondi, Oscar Santillán, Jaasir Linger, MingJou and Saar Scheerlings.
In the installation Mire of Melusine (2024), myth, ecology, and personal identity come together. Inspired by the folk legend of Melusine and the urban swamp landscape of my childhood, the sculptural installation explores trauma, spirituality and the intertwining of people and nature. Comprised of stones, metal, water pumps, many ceramics and lab parafernalia under grow lights, the artwork reads as a symbolic formula, connected childhood memories and ancient practices of medicine and alchemy in a search for queer identity and becoming.
Populating the installation, are several costumes from previous and upcoming live-works, evoking spirits of bogs, furious sirens on rocky coastlines and other seductive wise-womxn. In Mire of Melusine, past, present and future come together: it is a temple, place of offering, archive and private boudoir in one.
The ceramic works that I made form a prelude of the ceramic production residency I am a part of in 2025, at the EKWC (NL). More on these shapes and designs will follow as I continue on the soggy path of Wetlands Worship.
How is it going?
At the moment, I continue to work in my studio on more sculptures, fountains, and sacred bio-lab installations where uneasy organism live and populate ritualistic sculptures.
I am also recording and crafting the wetlands music record BZZ BZZ that stems from this research (to be released in 2025), and a documentary video-installation about my childhood in the swamps.
More soon!
XOXO
Venus
Project results:
- I had a showing at Rupert Vilnius Lithuania, LungA Festival Iceland, SIM Residency Reykjavik, NEST Gallery Miami and Garage Rotterdam so far.
- Blogs related to Wetlands Worship are: We Are Nature Defending Itself, Sacred Swamp, Swamp Priestess, HerringgodZ and Wetlands Music Video.
- Artworks made so far: Murky Medicine Swamp, OAKBaLLZ and EELskin, Herring God Moanz and Murky Murky, Little Bitch Witch (video) - which is also on Spotify, the music record Bzz Bzz, and several sculptures and fountains-in-progress at my studio, of which Mire of Melusine is one first result.
- I've given a talk about Wetlands Worship at SIM residency Iceland, Earthbound Symposium Denmark, and at Green Space Miami.
- The works OAKBaLLZ and EELSkin and Herring God MoanZ (Síldarguð MoanZ) are featured on the online performance art platform PerformVU.
- The essay At Home in Dark Waters is part of this research.
- My Artist-in-Residency at SIM Iceland and AIRIE Everglades, Florida is part of this research.
- I've offered Open Studio presentations in April and July 2024 related to this research.
Credits
The Wetlands Worship research has been made possible by Amsterdam Fund of the Arts, Amarte, Mondriaan Fund.