photo Simon Beckmann

Joya: AiR / Tash Kahn / ENG

‘I like punctuation and I was looking forward to Joya: AiR being a sort of comma in my life, a pause in which to collect my thoughts and just be. And it was that and more. It was a place of total stillness and humbling landscape. A place of early-morning walks to ruined houses and coffee brewed to the sound of birds echoing down the kitchen chimney. A place of interesting conversations over delicious meals, and of many new friends.

I arrived without a plan and it took a while to settle into the new routine. My usual habit of ‘doing a Rauschenberg’ and walking around picking up other people’s rubbish was frustrated by the remote location and lack of colourful litter. Instead I collected rusty tin cans and old bits of wood, hauling them back to my studio for a series of ephemeral sculptures. I also took many Polaroids and failed at a big painting, but it didn’t matter. As the days went on all pressure disappeared and I relaxed into the ebb and flow of the new routine.

The total isolation was challenging at times, but it afforded a space to notice the little things – trails of busy ants creating lines through the dust, the ever-changing sky, and the light on the spinning wind turbine. The constantly-shifting dynamic as people came and went led to many wonderful connections and new collaborations. Thank you Donna and Simon for a wonderful experience.

Tash Kahn

Tash Kahn studied a BA in Fine Art at University of East London. She works with many mediums, constantly recycling and remaking, taking other people’s rubbish and making it her own. Kahn has exhibited both nationally and internationally, with a recent project at the Stone Space Gallery in east London that saw her collaborate with Alice Wilson for Talking Heads – an exhibition of artistic responses. Exhibitions include: Picture Palace (2020) Transition Gallery, London; Talking Heads (2019) The Stone Space, London; 2019 Sluice refresh, M100, Odense; Backyard Sculpture (2019) Domobaal, London; Modern Finance (2019) Thamesside Gallery, London; Citizen (2018) Swiss Cottage Gallery, London; The Mechanical Reproduction of Dust (2018) Stand4 Gallery, New York. In 2014, she co-founded the visual-arts project DOLPH, and has helped facilitate 22 exhibitions, making partnerships with two London schools, as well as universities including UAL Wimbledon and The Royal College of Art, and numerous artists in the UK, New York and Berlin. DOLPH provides an alternative way for the community to engage with art, as well as being an invaluable learning resource. She is also an editor for Penguin and Sluice Magazine, and has given many lectures both at home and abroad.

Joya: playlist / Tash Kahn

Katrin Bohn

“Cortijada Los Gázquez (Joya: AiR) is so happily situated within this dramatic and scarce, hence rich landscape, it is impossible to escape its spell. The site has an incredible section with the house right in its middle.
It is a site surrounded by food. The endeavour of local farmers to sustain their lives from and with the coarse soil is (still) visible everywhere. Almonds, almonds, almonds, olives, oats, figs, herbs, herbs, herbs, pomegranates; my favourite being the way the land is terraced to allow for food growing and natural irrigation. There is so little water! Except when there is too much, which I witnessed during my one-week stay in a rare ‘gota fria’.

Donna and Simon have embedded their house, their art practice and their lives ever so carefully into this landscape making themselves part of it. Their attention to detail and beauty also signals the future: the rural and the urban are not enemies to fight but contrasts to be played on creatively.

Being an architect and academic on a writing retreat, the ecology of the house became my key inspiration: what would have happened if our everyday lives had developed just slightly different? My context for this is the city, the block of flats, individuals’ homes and their urban networks. But my context is also the way in which Los Gázquez has embraced the necessity to work with the sun, the wind, the water, the food and the waste. I have written three articles about a slightly different urban present – a common future? - one about a washing machine, one about a letter box and one about a potato pantry. I’ll take them back to Germany tomorrow.

Simon and Donna, good luck with reinstating the old ‘embalsa’; what a great project! I would love to come back and see that basin full of water and lush fruit-tree-lined food-growing terraces being naturally irrigated again”.

Katrin Bohn

Katrin Bohn is an architect, urban practitioner and academic. Her main research interests lie in sustainable architectural and urban design and centre around the concept of CPUL City (Continuous Productive Urban Landscape) which she developed within Bohn&Viljoen Architects since around the year 2000.

Much of Bohn's design research deals with the relationships between urban space and food-productive urban landscape and bridges the gaps between environmental design thinking, urban space production and sustainable lifestyles. Since the UK's first urban agriculture conference Urban Nature (2001), co-curated by Bohn, she has contributed widely to conferences, publications, exhibitions and design and policy debates, both nationally and abroad. As an internationally recognised urban agriculture expert, she has also been advising on national and international research, policy documents and pioneer projects. Her work has been quoted by the UN and UNESCO and has influenced urban planning in the UK, as well as worldwide.

Bohn studied architecture at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany (Diploma in Architecture), the University of East London (MSc in Architecture) and the École d'Architecture de Nantes, France (DAAD Scholarship). Since 1998, she runs a London-based architectural practice and environmental research consultancy with André Viljoen (Bohn&Viljoen Architects). Before this, she trained in architectural practices in Germany, Brazil, France and Britain, including work for Jourda & Perraudin (Lyon) and Stefan Schrodt Architekten (Berlin).

http://www.bohnandviljoen.co.uk/