Joya: AiR / Shayna Kowalczyk / GBR

“I got to know Joya: AiR through its 24-hour cycle. I learnt the low blue brightness of morning, when the air was fresh and we could still sit where the light blurred the table. I learnt the sauna heat of midday - bright and blinding - with the cicadas a wall of sound rising from the hills. I became familiar with the cool dark of my studio, with its shutters, and the kitchen, with its high ceilings and the echo of water from the tap which dripped like bells. We were careful not to waste the water. In the late afternoons, I would sleep, in light sheets and under paintings which sometimes I would study for their brush marks. My favourite time to walk was 7pm. I skipped like a goat up and down the empty ravine and watched the white rocks tumbling back towards me. Every footstep was a cloud of chalky white dust and the light was gold and round. I made notes of each of the plants I liked and which ones grew in symbiotic pairs. When I got tired walking, I would find something jutting out the earth to sit on and shake my hair loose and stretch my warm legs out. I only got lost once. I could hear my own breath a lot, and Frida’s great woofs - which reverberated the pines. At nine, no matter what, and wherever we had been, we would congregate on the metal bench to watch the sun’s slow dip between the hills. And then we spent the twilight eating together, almost fresh and cold enough to put a jumper on, talking and talking about everything we had found or thought that day or what we had dreams of finding or thinking tomorrow.

As a poet, my practice is interested in the poetic surreal as a tool for exploring experiences of marginalisation and life in a time of ecological collapse. During my time at Joya: AiR, I enjoyed also exploring a world-building aspect to my practice, using dream-like methods to imagine possible alternative futures”.

Shayna Kowalczyk

Shayna Kowalczyk is a poet and writer from London. Her work has appeared in bath magg, Propel Magazine, and berlin lit, among other publications, and she was shortlisted for the 2025 Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize. She is an alumna of the Roundhouse Poetry Collective and a current trustee at Apples and Snakes. Alongside her poetry practice, she works in environmental diplomacy and governance.

Simon Beckmann23 August 2025