AIRIE Asks with May Fellow Jasper Griepink walked us through their practice and time spent in the Everglades. Facilitating the talk was local artist and queer ecologist Lee Pivnik. This free event occurred on May 23rd, 7 pm, at Greenspace Miami and was streamed live on the AIRIE Instagram.
Venus Jasper (They/he) is a queer visual artist and musician, storyteller, world builder, writer, and curator, currently based in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
They completed a Masters in Fine Arts in 2023 at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. Born in a household broken by substance abuse, they spent their childhood free time in nearby swamplands, imagining worlds. The moist outdoors provided co-regulation for their nervous system; it became their queer neuro-diverse sacred space – a place to be with trauma; to receive guidance; be at peace.
In their current artistic practice, they work with participatory performances that take place inside greatly detailed hand-made multi-sensory installations. Via speculative and ritual gatherings, they like to offer room for queer kinship and connection with the natural world, and each other. Their first big solo show, EARTHSHRINE, presented a speculative shrine for soil full of earthly imaginations. It featured videos, drawings, sculptures, a scent-scape, and various live programs, all wrapped in a huge hand-made willow and hemp fiber sculptural wall. At the moment, Venus is working on Wetland Worship, a project focused on swamps, bogs, and other murky wetlands that are historically drained and misused. Jasper has exhibited internationally since 2010.
Lee Pivnik is an artist living in Miami, Florida. Working across disciplines, he takes inspiration from living systems and other species to imagine a future based on mutualistic relationships instead of extractive economies. Permeating his practice is the idea of entanglement - the touching, changing, mutating relationships between species and landscapes. Through these intimacies, worlds arise —worlds of decay and degradation or verdant flourishing. His sculptures, drawings, and installations create a visual language for ecological entanglement, referencing fungal networks, epiphytic plants, and emergent animal architectures that inhabit South Florida.
He co-directs the Institute of Queer Ecology (IQECO), an ever-evolving collaborative organism that brings peripheral solutions to environmental degradation to the forefront of public consciousness. IQECO projects are interdisciplinary but grounded in the theoretical framework of queer ecology, a tool for understanding ourselves, our environments, our biologies, and our collaborations through queer lenses.
In 2022, he began a long-term project called Symbiotic House, which reimagines the home as a potential site for climate care and adaptation. Symbiotic House will grow into a nature-culture learning center while enacting embodied mutualism as a design strategy. The project spawns from a personal desire to continue dwelling in a climate-precarious city through crafting ecological reciprocity.