Joya: AiR / William Crosby / UK-CYP

I wrote my application to Joya AiR from a hospital waiting room, following a health scare in the summer. All my family, friends, colleagues, and doctors had been telling me to slow down and take it easier for a long time, and now, my body had finally forced me to. Getting the email from Donna and Simon accepting my application while on the bus home was the pick-me-up I needed; I had something to look forward to and work towards.

Being at Joya: AiR made me realise that a different way of working was possible. I quickly became attuned to the pace of off-grid, communal life, living alongside the rising and setting of the sun, free from artificial light and the rest of modernity’s distractions. The environment Donna and Simon have created is something special: free of demand or expectation, respectful and in harmony with its local ecology, and genuine in its seeking of kinship.

I arrived to write a book chapter; my first. It is a practice-based chapter, which grows from my PhD research around sonic pedagogy, mud and soil studies, and broader ideas around how we learn and share knowledge through sound in the age of climate crisis. Joya AiR was the perfect setting in which to begin researching and writing: any moments of writers’ block were soon rectified by making a coffee and taking a stroll around the building, giving FouFou (the goat) a little stroke, taking deep breaths of mountain air, and listening to the sound of my footsteps upon the various types of earth and vegetation around the site.

Joya AiR is like an oasis; I know it is not a reality I can directly recreate in my daily life back here in UK, but the experience and learnings will reshape my ways-of-being. Donna and Simon were wonderful hosts, and now, friends. I’ve been attempting to recreate their recipes nightly, and I returned home feeling the most refreshed, nourished, and inspired I have been in years.

William Crosby

William Crosby is a British/Greek-Cypriot artist, musician, pedagogue, and agitator based in Cambridge/London UK.

His practice finds its foundations in the environmental humanities, sound art, and radical pedagogies, working with field recordings, text scores, improvisation, writing, and communal sound-making to ask how sound can build knowledge with our more-than-human contexts, and how this knowledge can develop communal pedagogical tools fit for our age of climate crises. This work thinks about how sound enables embodied encounters with others, and how these stand as a radical act of co-working.

William is a member of MUD Collective, a sedimentology–art–sound research group collaborating across Iraq, India, France, and the UK, who explore thinking with, through, and about mud, in consideration of shifting ideas around human and more-than-human, organic and inorganic intra-actions, and towards a real geopolitics for today. He is also a member of artist-activist duo, (CWxWC), with Dr Cecilia Wee, whose work seeks to sound out an investigation into re-tuning the politics of listening within multiple cultural, social, economic, and environmental crises.

William is currently a PhD student within the Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP) department, at London College of Communication: University of the Arts, London, under the supervision of Dr Mark Peter Wright and Prof Salomé Voegelin. He also lectures at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, in sound/music studies, media & communications, film and fine art. William is a Wysing Studio Artist 2024-2029.

www.crosbywilliam.com