University of the Arts London / Art for the Environment Award recipient Daniel Ginsburg / residency report

University of the Arts London / Art for the Environment Award / recipient Daniel Ginsburg

Residency report.

Joya: AiR report for AER 2022

Daniel Ginsburg

MA Photography

Graduated 01/22

London College of Communication

Residency dates: 15th – 28th of July

“Leaving for Joya: AiR was the first time I’d left the UK since the pandemic began. This was the year in which it seemed all British people got tired of staycations and clogged up airports and motorways trying to get out of the country. I had taken trains across Europe before, and so when AER and Joya: AiR suggested that they would prefer for me to arrive that way in order to keep my carbon footprint low, I leapt at the chance. I wanted to feel like I was truly traveling, to watch the countries pass me by and the world expand. After completing an MA course that was almost entirely online which found me developing a slow, urban, domestic practice, I was excited to see how it would begin to evolve once faced with the wider world – a nature reserve that felt like a frontier of climate change, a place where the death throes of the natural world could be felt – and fought – first hand.

I love long train journeys, and Europe’s network of incredibly efficient, interconnected, and cool trains blow the UK’s out of the park. I spent the best part of 3 days just travelling and watching the scenery fly by. It was the middle of summer, and so the heat was far too oppressive to really be outside in, so my impressions of my stopovers were brief or under cover of night.

I was the first artist of the season to arrive at Joya. I was immediately struck by the smart passive design of the building, after sitting in air-conditioned trains and sleeping in air-conditioned hostels for the last couple of days. The temperature was in the upper 30s, but the thick walls and the use of shutters kept the place cool and, when needed, breezy. It made me think about the smart ways we can live in harsh landscapes without requiring a large carbon footprint to provide us with comfort. The landscape could best be described as dry and spiky, but the sheer immensity of insect life meant that there was never any silence – just a constant pleasant buzzing, the rhythm of life.

My photographic practice utilises non-toxic materials, and so I began experimenting by making prints with caffenol solution, and keeping my water use to a minimum. This process is much slower and less predictable than when regular darkroom chemicals are used, but I vowed to stick by and master it despite its slowness often being frustrating and restricting. Still, it was better than having to walk around too much with my camera in the unforgiving heat.

It was once the other artists began to trickle in that I realised how incredible an experience this would be. We could, and did, spend hours chatting and sharing influences under the milky way, shooting stars, and satellites.

The residency came at a frightening time for Europe. For 2 days while I was there, an unprecedented heatwave caused temperatures to soar back home in the UK and in parts of France to more dangerous levels than in my patch of Spanish desert. Crops and houses began to catch fire. In Spain, wildfires were spreading at higher rates than normal, and crops were failing. In creating work about the Anthropocene, it felt strange being in a safe oasis – though I knew my location was more precarious than it felt.

As I’m prone to do, I looked to the future and at myth. At the new incredible images of deep space coming from the James Webb telescope that made the stars feel closer, stranger, and more interlinked to our survival as a species than ever. I looked at the chaos and burning our science had wrought on the Earth, like the direct result of what Prometheus started by stealing hungry fire from the gods. Like the result of a child pointing the magnifying glass of science into the reckless tinderbox of complex systems ecology. I created images by burning film negatives directly, using reflections and magnification and wasteful machines and camera lenses.

But, I didn’t want to just burn things. It went against my practice’s commitment to wonder (over doomsaying), and so I hunted the shady pine forests for inspiration…

Out here in the wild I felt more alone than I’d ever felt – so far away from civilisation and so much in the uncaring hands of nature. I’d see figures often, my brain expecting to see a person but instead it would be a tree, a rock.

The next pieces I made were an exploration of this animism my brain had begun ascribing to things just by virtue of being out in the wild. I played a kind of pareidolic Pokémon Go where I hunted down chimeric natural forms and captured them. I thought of them as kinds of trolls, which when caught in the knowing light of the sun are turned to stone. In some stories the sun is replaced with the blinding ‘truth’ of Christianity which is, to me, the peak of anthropocentrism. I was reminded of the Ursula le Guin short story The Author of the Acacia Seeds (2015), which I began to come back to again and again, about the future study of animal linguistics which alluded to a possible future study of phyto- and geo-linguistics. And so, each of my photographs were accompanied by a photogram made by the essence of the photograph’s subject, scattered randomly on the photographic paper as if in a form of divination to where it may be decoded, in several decades, centuries, or millennia, as language. A quotation from the subject.

Daniel Ginsburg / hand printed using caffenol

I’d brought with me the book The Web Of Meaning by Jeremy Lent (2021) about integrating ancient and indigenous wisdom with contemporary science. My work has always leant a lot on abstract organic forms, and I’d been looking for more ways to hone in on the fractal structures. By placing leaves directly into the enlarger, I found that I could create images out of these.

This was a whole playground of fertile ground. Fractals make up everything in the natural world (the flow of energy of fluids, geology, stars,) but can also be used to understand politics, urban planning, the process of consciousness. I wanted to stress and explore this human connection to fractals and to see where it would lead. The pictures I created were fascinating and brimming with potential, made up of criss-crossing layers of familiar and unfamiliar forms and patterns. I knew that my time of freedom and experimentation had been fruitful, and that all of these ideas would continue swirling around in me once I had to return home.

That was where my Joya: AiR journey ended. Refreshed and with ideas and inspiration brimming within me, I found myself back at home. Though the location and beautiful natural landscape of Joya are undoubtably stunning, the things I’ll carry with me are the incredible connections I made there. Days of silence interspersed with incredible discussions. Fascinating people who had made their way here from all over the world for different reasons, with different disciplines. I’ll also miss the incredible food, the warmth and kindness of Simon and Donna, and the welcoming licks from Frida. I’d like to thank the AER team for gifting me the change to escape the pressure of making and to be able to slow down, breathe, and absorb inspiration from the environment, in what was truly an unforgettable experience.

Daniel Ginsburg

References:

Le Guin, Ursula K. (2015) ‘The Author of Acacia Seeds’, from The Real and the Unreal: Selected Stories from Ursula K. Le Guin, Volume 2, Gollancz: London
Lent, J. (2021) The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe, Profile Books: London.