“My partner Eliu Almonte and I were among the first artists to arrive at Joya: AiR after the COVID closure. We live in Málaga, and while we were incredibly fortunate to not suffer great hardship during Spain’s strict lockdown, all the associated stress had nevertheless accumulated in every tissue, neuron and ligament of my body and brain.

Quite a bit of my work relates to lessons I’ve learned from my extreme sensitivity to environmental and cultural toxicity, on my journey from being a young hot-shot working in climate change in the Clinton-Gore White House through multiple breakdowns in my personal ecosystem, deviations of life plans, and the disruptive process of seeking a more sustainable life-path.

The world in which we applied to go to Joya: AiR had changed completely by the time we got there, and so any expectations or plans I had originally were out the window.  For the first few days I couldn’t ‘work’ - at least not as I pictured ‘work’.  I was in fact doing incredibly important creative work, that of slowly relaxing, allowing my cells to breathe and settle into being in this remote, quiet, beautiful place with no phone signal…

As a performance artist I usually do a lot of research for each project, I make plans, I collect objects or make video-collages, but I always know that my response to the performance site, whether the building, the landscape, or the city, will be a key element and material, and this cannot be predicted.   Even during the performance there are surprises, ‘accidents’, that enrich my artwork and make the difference between performance and theater.

So when I started going for walks in the pine forest around Joya: AiR, and I lay down on the earth to luxuriate in hearing only wind, birds, and my own breathing,  I knew to pay attention.  In the last few years I have developed a new extreme sensitivity, this time to mechanical sounds of a certain frequency, like the dentist’s tools, big power tools, high-powered hand dryers in public bathrooms - all have become intolerable and are almost impossible to escape.  I had been telling my loved ones that I’d been feeling that 2020 was scraping away all the insulation around my nerves, both literally and figuratively.  Lying on the ground amongst the trees at Joya: AiR, I felt like I could sense that insulation recuperating in real time, that I could allow all my senses to open without fear.

Based on this feeling I created the Wild Woman, like a forest witch or goddess, who transforms from mere human, whose skin is covered with the green of the trees, the blue of the sky, sprouting a crown of feathers like the birds, and extrasensory eyes everywhere, eyes that also hear, feel, and sense the communication that scientists have proven happens among trees in a forest.

The white walls on both the interior and exterior architecture at Joya inspired me to experiment with projections/installation of a video I had been working on.

Rather than creating a narrative, or something to be viewed on a standard screen, I played with ideas for an installation, alternating disorienting sections of me underwater and footage shot by my brother flying his radio-controlled FPV planes with a tiny camera in the nose, so the effect is like those dreams of flying we all have had.  I played with putting the underwater sounds with the sky, or recordings of me breathing in the forest against seeing me underwater.  Then I experimented with projecting over arches, wooden window shutters, tilting the projector, into a corner, over an external window that someone opens and sticks their head out, on the rippled ceiling of the dining room.  No finished project, just good material for future work that I definitely would not have been able to do at home.  Thank you Joya: AiR.

Jessica Fairfax Hirst

Jessica Fairfax Hirst aka Palmer Fishman

I am a multidisciplinary artist, working primarily in performance, video, installation and 3D collage.  I have been a refugee since 2006 from the toxic habitat in the United States, having lived in Nicaragua, Spain and the Dominican Republic. 

I work with an expanded process of site-specific creation all over the world on themes such as neurodiversity and other forms of difference, sociopolitical issues such as human trafficking and the ongoing impacts of US interventions in Latin America, and various aspects of climate change and our place in the ecosystems we inhabit.

I have a highly sensitive personal ecosystem, such that I have been seriously impacted by my reactions to unhealthy environments, such as graduate art school in Los Angeles or a hipster Jerusalem neighborhood full of young people who party while toting enormous weapons.   I endeavor to make use of my mental and physical responses as another art material, and listen to what they tell me.

In addition to my Earth Systems degree from Stanford I have studied at the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley, and Public Practice at Otis College of Art and Design.  I also cofounded a site-specific contemporary dance company, CatScratch Theatre, in Washington, DC.