Joya: AiR / Claudia Robalino / ECU
photo Simon Beckmann
Joya: AiR / Claudia Robalino / ECU
“At Joya: AiR, I engaged with the landscape intuitively. Mapping my daily walks and documenting them through a series of interactive “tools” made with wild clay collected onsite.
The sculpted tools play with the body intimately. They focus on the corporeal postures experienced during a walk, and the pauses taken to smell, touch, and observe. The process of making happened indoors, working in the studio only from memory to translate the walks into material narratives and the rhythms of my body into rituals of repetition. The objects laid out on the communal table at the end of the residency, remember the daily ritual of shared dinners with the artists. They rearrange the clay from the site into a reductive geometry and ephemeral botanic surfaces that evoke the body-nature interrelations - the linear and cyclical times, the ecological growth and transformation, individual and collective, sound and silence. A performative encounter in which the space inhabited is the residual trace of the walk and the unfired material is the medium of temporal documentation.
The roads in the landscape were an invitation to walk, yet the paths taken during my residency were unpredictable and unplanned, exposing them like a text that needs to be read in order to embody the vast space. The encounters with the land are not reduced to a place, a length, a material, or a location; but rather transcribed into tools of observation in the abstraction of language. The steps taken are visually undocumented, allowing the space to be inhabited by anyone who experiences the objects; and that itself creates another space too.
As part of my practice, walking in nature is primary to the work, and yet the spatial experience is left to the user’s imagination. Not showing a walk or a representation of it, but encounters between geography, body and ritual. An evocative narrative of corporeal and sensorial moments experienced outdoors and dislocated to the "domestic" indoors”.
Claudia is a multidisciplinary Ecuadorian designer, she studied Architecture in Ecuador, Sustainable Design at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign - USA and recently graduated with MA in Architecture at the Royal College of Art London, where she won the Dean's Prize, Head of Program Prize and was nominated for the RIBA Silver Medal Prize for her thesis "Tailoring Camouflage." This project, driven by her childhood living in the Andes, is a vital part of her creative practice; focused on methods of environmental conservation such as expressive camouflage and ancestral rituals of planting, weaving and walking in nature. Her work investigates the body-nature interrelationships across multiple scales of intimacy, interweaving bodily experiences and cyclical living while actively confronting extractivist forms in vulnerable ecosystems. Her projects have been published in Architects Journal, Linseed Journal, Koozarch, and Arts Thread, RIBA among others and exhibited in Galleries in London, Rome, the Tallinn Design Festival and Ecuador. Soundscapes, scent and oral histories are part of her investigation, transcribing them into digital & spatial interventions which often use photography and natural materials and allow for collective experiences to take place; alongside new dialogues & connections.