A Searching the Sonic Swamp, is an artist talk on Ecological Grief, Neuroqueer Kinship with the more-than-human and the idea of Sacred Decay. By Venus Jasper
How do we hold space for emotional, ecological, and cultural breakdownโand what can the swamp teach us about surviving and transforming in times of decay?
In this hybrid artist talk and embodied reflection, Amsterdam-based artist Venus Jasper shares research developed during their residency at Graner (Barcelona), where they are preparing a new solo performance for the Following the Sun cycle at Museu Tร pies, curated by Gabriel Virgilio Luciani. This work will emerge from their long-term project Wetlands Worship, a transdisciplinary exploration of swamps, grief, queerness, and sacred ecologies.
Venus’s practice blends ritual, performance, music, and speculative environments to imagine post-capitalist futures and more-than-human kinships. Working through neurodivergent and queer ways of sensing and relating, their work envisions alternative spiritualities beyond secular modernity and colonial-capitalist frameworks. Alter-egosโsuch as a pagan high-priestess, ritual caretaker, or pop-starโappear as guides through spaces of breakdown, transmutation, and re-enchantment.
Practical informations:
At Graner, Venus is developing a raw, stripped-back performance based on their upcoming music record Bzz Bzzโa dark industrial-gothic soundwork shaped by personal and planetary grief. Built from insect drones, water, metal, storms, and chainsaws, Bzz Bzz takes listeners across a rotting sea to a mythic swamp-island where decay is sacred, and rage becomes ritual.
This artist talk dives into previous work of the maker, and explores the the emotional and conceptual terrain behind Bzz Bzz and Wetlands Worshipโoffering reflections on swamps as spaces of sacred decay, queer ancestry, and neuroqueer kinship. Venus invites us to consider what it means to relinquish control, to unlearn mastery, and to compost cultural myths of purity, progress, and separation. What if decay is not an endโbut a threshold?
Read more
Read less
