On Venus

Staff’s On Venus is comprised of two parts. The first of scratched, warped, and overlapping footage documenting the industrial farming of hormonal, reproductive, and carnal animal commodities including urine, semen, meat, skins, and fur. Rather than reducing the struggles of animals to a human-centric view, Staff questions the norms, subjectivity, and standards by which all are read, measured and controlled and asks what lives are deemed visible in institutional spaces. The video’s second half relays a poem describing life on Venus, an alternative state of non-life or near-death—a queer state of being—that is volatile and in constant metamorphosis; one infused with the unrelenting violence of pressure and heat, destructive winds and the disorientating lapse of day into night.