“Set in the highlands of Almería, within the Comarca de Los Vélez, Joya: AiR inhabits a landscape shaped by wind, water, and time — a place where the mountains hold forests, and the valleys crack open into drylands. This is a transitional terrain: part wildland, part badlands, rich with contrasts and resilience.

Here, ecological boundaries are visible and felt — in the arid breath of the soil, the patterns of abandonment and regrowth, the erosional signatures etched into the land. Yet this is not a desert. It is a semi-arid ecotone where biodiversity and geological memory intersect, offering a raw and urgent context for creative exploration.

Artists-in-residence engage not just with landscape, but with process: of restoration, of listening, of imagining alternatives to extraction and decline. Los Vélez is not merely backdrop — it is collaborator, archive, and provocation.

At Joya: AiR, you are invited into dialogue with a territory at the threshold — where creative practice becomes an act of care, and the future of drylands is not yet written.”