‘A shimmer of a possible space and time’
Garage Rotterdam in conversation with the artist Venus Jasper
Garage Rotterdam spoke with Venus Jasper (Griepink), who is currently showcasing work in the exhibition Ghosts of Futures Past. Read more about Venus Jaspers’ multidisciplinary practice, work and inspirations below!
You work across art, lecturing, writing and you also embody the role of a “world-building priestess.” Can you share more about everything you do?
“To be fair, most of the time I’m behind a laptop, applying for funding, sorting out to-do lists and structuring projects. It is hard to stay buoyant as an artist in an increasingly challenging world. But my priestess comes out though — when I sing or perform, cast vocal spells to honor animate spirits, or to express anger; at how commercial industries ravage the natural world and the human spirit.” — Venus Jasper
Over the last 15 years, Venus Jasper’s world-building has happened across various media, from installations to text, music, video works and performance. With their world-building, Venus Jasper likes to immerse people in a place, a space, a world if you will. The artist geeks for details and likes to showcase lots of objects and tools to create a “shimmer of a possible space and time” — a speculative world that helps viewers to consider and reflect upon our present world.
The artist dreams of ways of life beyond the horizon of “Western” systems — like oligarchical powers based on extortion, ownership and stark imbalances between the affluent and the labor classes — where any idea of spirituality is often seen with raised eyebrows.
“Since October 2023 I am reminded on a daily basis that we are still in the post-feudal wars, trying to form class unions under oligarchs, balancing personal lives with higher and higher bills, while highly addictive media is shattering our brains. In the center of all this mess, I think it’s important to rekindle our relations with spirituality, with the earth, and with nuanced ways of sensing things. That’s why I create. In my work, I try to hint at alternative ways of being connected to life, to each other, and the earth in a more spirited, spiritual, or connected way.”
In your artworks you address “spirited post-capitalisms”. Can you elaborate on what that concept means to you?
“To me, “spirited” implies something which is imbued with spirit; to be in honor of. But also something that is alive, playful and surprising.” Venus Jasper says that society and organized religions rub our spirituality in or out of us in weird ways. To be enchanted again, is what drives the artist.
Venus Jasper shares that in many movies nowadays, viewers are given visions of “heavy post-apocalyptic realities; in which a system crashes or is played out to some billionaires in off-world colonies, with the rest of us trapped in labor camps.”
Venus Jasper doesn’t see a utopian, inspiring viable way of life in those movies. “Most of the dystopian scenarios we see in fiction are actually realities for many less privileged communities. It seems very hard for us to speculate or envision viable ways of life that do work. It is so much easier to create dystopia, and I think that’s fucked up.”
“To dream of spirited-ness in that post-crash, kindles a chance of human virtues such as community, care and reverence to endure. It honors the fact that in the long run, spirit always survives”
Beyond post-capitalism, your work touches on various other themes — from ecology to spirituality and queerness. Can you share the main topics that run through your art and research?
“I always look at the world through a lens of great sensitivity. I am puzzled by how my brain functions, and how in the past I’ve often linked that to more mythic ways of seeing, like the shamanic or psychic. At the moment, I am investigating how this meta-awareness could be manufactured through neuro-divergence or trauma-coping mechanisms.” Venus Jasper always felt greatly calmed while being in the wilderness, by tuning into greater energies that go far beyond the daily mundane. The artist used to think that these experiences meant something spiritual or divine, but now realizes that it was perhaps more so “ a neuro-calmness, rather than a great spirit.” The artist sees ecology, spirituality and queerness as all having the power to suspend the false separation between the mythical and the scientific. “It leaves things interconnected and interdependent.”
What elements do we see in your installation Mire of Melusine and what do they represent?
“Ha! There are many elements that make up the installation. I think what most people see first, is the large number of chalk stones, creating a platform for more detailed elements. The stones are the urban cityscape: visualizing the strange desire to pave every inch of the world with a grey hard substance. I can’t help but see what is dormant under all that matter: wilderness older than us.”
In the installation Mire of Melusine we also see cast aluminium serpent body parts, water pumps, glass and metal lab equipment, shelves, some books, costumes made by neoprene and fish leather, sex toys, gemstones, strips of ADHD medicines, ibuprofen, a pop cd from 2002 amongst many other elements. “I think all these elements make up who I am. Perhaps it is about how I manage to resurface as myself despite a grey world.”
Your installation is inspired by the folk legend of Melusine. Who is she?
“Melusine is a figure of European folklore: a female spirit of fresh water in a holy well or river. She is usually depicted as a woman who is a serpent or fish from the waist down. Her legends are connected with the northern and western areas of France, Luxembourg, and the Low Countries. Much like most myths that involve earthy feminine archetypes, the true story of Melusine is probably heavily corrupted and adapted by later patriarchal influences.”
“The most common version of the story around Melusine is that she was found by a man in the wilderness, agreed to marry him, and give birth to his offspring, for the trade that she gets to have her Saturdays in the bathroom to herself, because that is when she transforms into a serpentine creature for the night. In other versions, she also has daughters with similar powers. To me it points to the idea of a lineage of people that possess a certain knowledge or have a stake in an ontology that was slowly erased from European history.”
How does Melusine inform the themes of your work and your personal relationship with nature and the body?
“I found out about the stories of Melusine while working on the tailored black fish-leather dress that is now hanging in the installation Mire of Melusine. It’s a dress that I intend to wear for an upcoming music video called SIREN. As an AMAB non-binary person who likes to wear “femme” coded gowns in art performances to orate emotional reflections on behalf of the natural world — inside a square art world — I project myself into her. Like her, I am close to water, especially murky waters, where Melusine dwells. She seems to be a trans character, half human and half water-being, and changing from time to time. She has to hide who she is, and later is also exiled for being the cross-species entity that she is. I think Melusine is connected to realms that many people are afraid of: a certain darkness.”
How did your childhood memories and experiences near the wetlands of Eindhoven influence your work?
“I spent large parts of my childhood playing in a swampy woodland near Eindhoven, one of the first sort of safe spaces I remember, I could be myself there. I was also very much into witchcraft in my teens, and that tradition brought me in connection with natural elements. Interwoven with all this was the fact that there was substance abuse in my household, and there was the city itself. All these spaces were there to explore my artistic self, process feelings, explore my sexuality and my otherworldliness. And being in and out of the swamps on a daily base made who I am today.”
Venus Jasper made the video Murky Murky, Little Bitch Witch during a residency in Iceland in 2023 and is based upon a vocal recording Jasper made during a live performance at Rupert, Vilnius. The video critiques the effect of human industries on wetlands.
How does this project connect to Wetlands Worships; your broader research into the politics of environmental destruction?
Venus Jasper explains that places like the UK and the US were much more wet than they are right now, most of those murky spaces nowadays have been destroyed. “The great drainage works of the past several hundred years have made more land ready for agriculture — which turned out to be a type of around-the-clock non-stop agriculture that mirrors our society’s obsession with never-ending growth and expansion.”
In Murky, Murky Little Bitch Witch we see throngs of dead fish floating on the water. We also see the image of the CEO of Iceland’s biggest fishing conglomerate, who was involved in the Fishrot Scandal. The main character we see crawling in the video, would be the ‘Murky Murky Little Bitch Witch’ herself — wearing a customized wetsuit adorned with shells, symbols and chains. The Murky Murky Little Bitch Witch can be either seen lying down dead, or in communion with the wetlands and the earth. This character is one of resilience and defiance. “I only stink because you drained me”, they say.
“The video proposes a sort of neo-myth, it gives name to a possible folkloric entity that can be seen or consulted with in murky wetlands areas, a being that can remind us of the agency of spaces that resist commodification in a system of production. But the murky witch is also someone who is okay with feeling down or depressed, she has room for that too. I like to look at her as a sort of angry and lamenting saint for people who experience grief. Collective grief, ecological grief, personal grief.”
Your work often involves elements of folklore and spirituality. How do you use these aspects to communicate urgent environmental messages?
“Storytelling or oratory arts have always been my means to reflect and make sense of the present world. It is an ancient craft, a mythical and social practice. I am very inspired by the legacy of Celtic and Gaulish druids who used speechcraft. In 2023, I also heard this story via a conversation I witnessed between the music artist Anohni and artist Lynette Wallworth, wherein they shared how Aboriginal elders in Australia talk about an ancient twin river meeting at the south of the continent. As there was no recorded knowledge of this river, it was considered what we call a “myth”. But then a marine geology survey discovered two ancient river beds beneath the waves. The twin rivers of myth had really been there, are still there, but the ocean was a lot lower when the story originated. So the story of the twin rivers is over 20.000 years old!”
“I don’t think any other device of data we have today could survive that long. But story can. Folklore has always been there to help information travel across time and generations.”
In the back of the exhibition space we see a small glimmering artwork: Spirits. Workers. Kin. (2024). Here you use Byzantine iconography and gold leaf to elevate insects and microorganisms into sacred symbols. What inspired you to explore the concept of sacredness in relation to these often overlooked entities?
“My work has always been about exploring the sacredness of overlooked natural elements. When I was preparing for a performance in Vilnius, I found old books with illustrations of insects and depictions of the things we usually don’t want in our garden or farm; rot, pests, critters, and crawlers. I wanted to make icons of these undesired beings and processes, because no matter how often they ruin crops, we couldn’t live without them; the detrivores and other processes and beings that decompose matter. I like knowing that there are forces at play in the soils that we don’t fully grasp, but we can learn to work with them. Having reverence for things that aren’t necessarily pretty or virtuous in old-fashioned ways can help us embrace our whole selves more as well.”
Can you say more about the liminal space between life and death in this piece?
“Most of us are afraid of death or wonder what will happen, but we rarely fear about the space before we enter life. I believe this is what the ancient Celtic thought when they considered reincarnation; the fertile darkness before and after life are the same space.
“In our society’s approach to the economy, we learn to despise finitudes. We learn to regret limitations or endings, rather than learning to lean into it. A culture obsessed with a delusional more-more-more can’t really understand life. Capitalism’s curse is that it attempts to overlook finiteness by postponing inevitable endings. This concept doesn’t align with the world. The laboring insects and molds know more than us in that regard — they understand limits and renewal.”
You draw inspiration from Ursula K. Le Guin’s words: “The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives”. Can you elaborate on how this idea relates to your artistic vision?
“I love this quote so much. Let’s think about it; in life, do we thrive, develop and survive because we are unbreakable? Or because we can adapt, let go, re-align, start again, rest and renew?”
“We spend about ⅓ of our lives asleep. We can live because we rest, we grow because we let go. When looking at ecological systems, queerness, spirituality, and the artistic journey, we have similar cycles. It is enchanting to realize over and again that we don’t do culture, society, art, and life on our own; it is a collaborative process over decades and centuries. Our creations are woven into the tapestry that many worked on over the centuries before us.”
Your work challenges industrial capitalist structures based on exploitation and ownership. In what way do you think art can contribute to reshaping power structures?
“I honestly don’t know. I believed in permaculture, activism, and artistic creations guiding people into understanding. But as of late I feel like artists and mystics are more like the flies that orbit around a rotting corpus. Observing. Awaiting. Watching.”
“While we’re panicking about climate change and rising fascism, while not really knowing what the future will hold, we can be reminded that many people around the globe have already lived in these ‘man-made’ realities for centuries. Apocalyptic news is creeping closer to our picket fence homes. And this makes me think of the role of artists: are we supposed to be financial prodigies gathering accolades and solo shows, or was our role always to help transitions in society, facilitate reflection, space for emotion, dare I say offer room for spirituality?”
