Murky Murky, Little Bitch Witch (video)

Murky Murky, Little Bitch Witch is part of Venus Jasper’s ongoing research project Wetlands Worship. This work features an individual crawling on an island of kelp and passing through the blackened ocean floor, on its way to land. The person is 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 person is seen facedown, dead, in the water.

Shot in Iceland, the video Murky Murky, Little Bitch Witch offers critique to the 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. 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.