University of the Arts London / Art for the Environment Award recipient Daniel Ginsburg / residency report

photo Simon Beckmann

University of the Arts London / Art for the Environment Award / recipient Daniel Ginsburg

Residency report.

Joya: AiR report for AER 2022

Daniel Ginsburg

MA Photography

Graduated 01/22

London College of Communication

Residency dates: 15th – 28th of July

“Leaving for Joya: AiR was the first time I’d left the UK since the pandemic began. This was the year in which it seemed all British people got tired of staycations and clogged up airports and motorways trying to get out of the country. I had taken trains across Europe before, and so when AER and Joya: AiR suggested that they would prefer for me to arrive that way in order to keep my carbon footprint low, I leapt at the chance. I wanted to feel like I was truly traveling, to watch the countries pass me by and the world expand. After completing an MA course that was almost entirely online which found me developing a slow, urban, domestic practice, I was excited to see how it would begin to evolve once faced with the wider world – a nature reserve that felt like a frontier of climate change, a place where the death throes of the natural world could be felt – and fought – first hand.

I love long train journeys, and Europe’s network of incredibly efficient, interconnected, and cool trains blow the UK’s out of the park. I spent the best part of 3 days just travelling and watching the scenery fly by. It was the middle of summer, and so the heat was far too oppressive to really be outside in, so my impressions of my stopovers were brief or under cover of night.

I was the first artist of the season to arrive at Joya. I was immediately struck by the smart passive design of the building, after sitting in air-conditioned trains and sleeping in air-conditioned hostels for the last couple of days. The temperature was in the upper 30s, but the thick walls and the use of shutters kept the place cool and, when needed, breezy. It made me think about the smart ways we can live in harsh landscapes without requiring a large carbon footprint to provide us with comfort. The landscape could best be described as dry and spiky, but the sheer immensity of insect life meant that there was never any silence – just a constant pleasant buzzing, the rhythm of life.

My photographic practice utilises non-toxic materials, and so I began experimenting by making prints with caffenol solution, and keeping my water use to a minimum. This process is much slower and less predictable than when regular darkroom chemicals are used, but I vowed to stick by and master it despite its slowness often being frustrating and restricting. Still, it was better than having to walk around too much with my camera in the unforgiving heat.

Daniel Ginsburg

It was once the other artists began to trickle in that I realised how incredible an experience this would be. We could, and did, spend hours chatting and sharing influences under the milky way, shooting stars, and satellites.

The residency came at a frightening time for Europe. For 2 days while I was there, an unprecedented heatwave caused temperatures to soar back home in the UK and in parts of France to more dangerous levels than in my patch of Spanish desert. Crops and houses began to catch fire. In Spain, wildfires were spreading at higher rates than normal, and crops were failing. In creating work about the Anthropocene, it felt strange being in a safe oasis – though I knew my location was more precarious than it felt.

Daniel Ginsburg

As I’m prone to do, I looked to the future and at myth. At the new incredible images of deep space coming from the James Webb telescope that made the stars feel closer, stranger, and more interlinked to our survival as a species than ever. I looked at the chaos and burning our science had wrought on the Earth, like the direct result of what Prometheus started by stealing hungry fire from the gods. Like the result of a child pointing the magnifying glass of science into the reckless tinderbox of complex systems ecology. I created images by burning film negatives directly, using reflections and magnification and wasteful machines and camera lenses.

Daniel Ginsburg

But, I didn’t want to just burn things. It went against my practice’s commitment to wonder (over doomsaying), and so I hunted the shady pine forests for inspiration…

Daniel Ginsburg

  Out here in the wild I felt more alone than I’d ever felt – so far away from civilisation and so much in the uncaring  hands of nature. I’d see figures often, my brain expecting to see a person but instead it would be a tree, a rock.

Daniel Ginsburg

Daniel Ginsburg

Daniel Ginsburg (view to Joya: AiR)

The next pieces I made were an exploration of this animism my brain had begun ascribing to things just by virtue of being out in the wild. I played a kind of pareidolic Pokémon Go where I hunted down chimeric natural forms and captured them. I thought of them as kinds of trolls, which when caught in the knowing light of the sun are turned to stone. In some stories the sun is replaced with the blinding ‘truth’ of Christianity which is, to me, the peak of anthropocentrism. I was reminded of the Ursula le Guin short story The Author of the Acacia Seeds (2015), which I began to come back to again and again, about the future study of animal linguistics which alluded to a possible future study of phyto- and geo-linguistics. And so, each of my photographs were accompanied by a photogram made by the essence of the photograph’s subject, scattered randomly on the photographic paper as if in a form of divination to where it may be decoded, in several decades, centuries, or millennia, as language. A quotation from the subject.

Daniel Ginsburg / hand printed using caffenol

Daniel Ginsburg / hand printed using caffenol

I’d brought with me the book The Web Of Meaning by Jeremy Lent (2021) about integrating ancient and indigenous wisdom with contemporary science. My work has always leant a lot on abstract organic forms, and I’d been looking for more ways to hone in on the fractal structures. By placing leaves directly into the enlarger, I found that I could create images out of these.

This was a whole playground of fertile ground. Fractals make up everything in the natural world (the flow of energy of fluids, geology, stars,) but can also be used to understand politics, urban planning, the process of consciousness. I wanted to stress and explore this human connection to fractals and to see where it would lead. The pictures I created were fascinating and brimming with potential, made up of criss-crossing layers of familiar and unfamiliar forms and patterns. I knew that my time of freedom and experimentation had been fruitful, and that all of these ideas would continue swirling around in me once I had to return home.

title: anima 1 / Daniel Ginsberg

title: anima 2 / Daniel Ginsburg

That was where my Joya: AiR journey ended. Refreshed and with ideas and inspiration brimming within me, I found myself back at home. Though the location and beautiful natural landscape of Joya are undoubtably stunning, the things I’ll carry with me are the incredible connections I made there. Days of silence interspersed with incredible discussions. Fascinating people who had made their way here from all over the world for different reasons, with different disciplines. I’ll also miss the incredible food, the warmth and kindness of Simon and Donna, and the welcoming licks from Frida. I’d like to thank the AER team for gifting me the change to escape the pressure of making and to be able to slow down, breathe, and absorb inspiration from the environment, in what was truly an unforgettable experience.

Daniel Ginsburg / hand printed with caffenol

Daniel Ginsburg

References:

• Le Guin, Ursula K. (2015) ‘The Author of Acacia Seeds’, from The Real and the Unreal: Selected Stories from Ursula K. Le Guin, Volume 2, Gollancz: London

• Lent, J. (2021) The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe, Profile Books: London.

photo Simon Beckmann

“Joya: AiR for us was the beginning of a collaborative process after both graduating from Central St Martins UAL, last year. We approached the residency with very little forethought with the intention to let the experience of the place and people guide our approach, with only one set of ideals which was to respond in sculpture. 

After arriving at Joya: AiR it became apparent that the physicality of the landscape captured our attention in the potential of the abundance of clay. We had used clay as a sculpting material before, primarily to make moulds for casting however prior to Joya: AiR we had never worked with natural clay on the spot. We therefore began a learning process of how to refine and mix the clay beneath our feet and the use of cob as a building material. This led to a range of sculptural pieces with process and the heart of the work, through experiments with the clay we also discovered that the making process and outcome were also beginning to emulate the landscape itself in terms of the building of layer after layer evoking the sedimentary layers visible in the landscape. 

We also spent much of our time walking and hiking in the local area, especially in the winding baranco’s where we became captivated with the opportunity to find fossils and the experience of the scale of time that this generates. Over the 2 weeks we developed a small collection of fossils and rocks with which we attempted to weave in to our work to explore the notions of time and place, resulting in a pseudo scientific lab within our studio.

The residency challenged our previous perceptions of making work, which made us reconsider our approach to making art both technically and conceptually. 

Nana Sawada Elliott Haigh . https://cargocollective.com/elliottnana

obra Nana Sawada Elliott Haigh

obra Nana Sawada Elliott Haigh

obra Nana Sawada Elliott Haigh

“The time to reflect and reconsider your practice is often overlooked or neglected in favour of production. While at Joya, the opportunity to slow down and pay attention to some of the natural anchors in your work cannot be underestimated. It has been a privilege to walk in the beautiful Sierra María-Los Vélez national park and to bond with a group of artists varying in creative disciplines. The type of thinking achieved here is unique and has made powerful ripples in my life.

As you allow yourself to commit to Joya’s temperament, you become aware of the detail and care that has been taken to create this experience. The subtlety of both Donna and Simon to be available and yet hidden from view allows you to safely commit to deep thinking and the ability to separate yourself from the daily routine that we are all seeking to forget.

The landscape and the people get under your skin in a way that is hard to do justice in words. It is something shared by those who have been in residence at Joya and I imagine every group who passes through has a different shade or hue that colours the landscape.

I look forward to bringing what I have discovered back into my continuing practice in London and hope to uncover elements of my practice I was not aware were going through a transformation.

Thank you”.

Roman Sheppard Dawson

cargocollective.com/romanshepparddawson

Roman Sheppard Dawson is a moving image artist based in London and a Central Saint Martins graduate in fine art 4D. His work has evolved from moving image based sculptures into a practice exploring movement/gesture in the moving image and space.

“I came to Joya: AiR through University of the Arts London’s Art for the Environment Residency program. I am an MA student at UAL currently writing my thesis, which looks at design activism, considering how fashion can protest against overconsumption in the digital age.

As a fashion designer and academic, I do not typically see myself as an artist or allow myself the uninterrupted space to create. Prior to departing for Spain, I at some point Googled, ‘what do you do at an art residency?’. But my unpreparedness and unconventional practice did not matter once I arrived. I spent my time reading, walking, and creating in a gentle balance. I did not give myself deadlines, or where I did, I did not meet them. But this didn’t matter; because I will continue to build on the pages I filled in my sketchbook long after the residency. 

 My work is often focused on the social and environmental impacts of the fashion system. It is a daunting, often contradictory, and continually exciting realm in which to work. Yet, being at Joya gave me a clearer picture of what it means to practice environmentalism in an all-encompassing way. From the power of the wind and sun to the precious nature of every drop of water that comes through the tap. Life seems to move a little slower, yet somehow the 2 weeks I spent there seem to have gone by in an instant”. 

Bronwyn Seier

https://www.bronwynseier.com/

Internationally acclaimed artist, UAL (University of the Arts London) Chair of Art and the Environment Lucy Orta has launched an Art for the Environment Residency Programme, in partnership with residency programmes across Europe. Applicants get to choose between two and four week residencies at one of the hosting institutions, to explore concerns that define the twenty first century - biodiversity, environmental sustainability, social economy, human rights - and through their artistic practice, envision a world of tomorrow.

This is the third time that Joya: AiR has been invited to host the recipient of the award and we are very pleased to announce this years selected artist as Bronwyn Seier.

We will hear more from Bronwyn when she arrives in September.

Less is More: 12 Days In Joya: arte + ecología

It feels difficult to report the experience I had in the residency at Joya: arte + ecología. Although it was an insightful one, which nurtured me a lot, it seems I am still digesting it. Perhaps that is because somehow it has not finished yet, once its outputs are still in progress.

Before arriving at Cortijada Los Gázquez at Parque Natural Sierra María-Los Vélez I only had a vague idea of the dynamic of the place and of how my project would be developed over there. Aware that I would only find it out in situ, I tried to prepare myself as much as I could. In my suitcase I was bringing a couple of books, my equipment and some objects that I imagined to make work with. Arriving in Granada, though, I have been told that my luggage was lost and that the airline company could not guarantee the exact delivery date.

Spending the first week with only few clothes and part of the equipment would have been an unfortunate beginning, unless it did not allow me a deeper exchange with the place I was inserted in. As Rauschenberg said, “when you are lost you look so much harder”.[1]

My initial project was based on an ambiguous sensation of missing the natural environment from my home country, which had been strong since I moved to London one year ago.[2] The nostalgia of having a lifestyle in Brazil, which was more integrated with nature than I have been able to do recently, was combined with an anger provoked by facts regarding the huge devastation there. I was particularly struck by the recent disaster caused by the collapse of a mining dam in a Minas Gerais, which created an enormous environmental impact. The strong image of the mud invading villages, rivers and the sea was attached to my memory about Brazil and generated the need to produce a work of that.

In this residency, I wanted to approach this double relation to the environment, between a certain healing that nature can promote and the environmental disaster. Inspired by De Maria’s manifesto On the Importance of Natural Disasters, in which he states that natural catastrophes ‘may be the highest form of art possible to experience’, I was interested in this same force that can be both generative and destructive – whether producing an artwork or a disaster. Intending to avoid making a spectacle out of the images of the disaster in Minas Gerais, my initial proposition was to try and create experiments using the sound of the explosion plus sounds that would be recorded during the residency.

Although I was interested in that Brazilian landscape, after my arrival in Andalucía it became clear that it would be more sincere to react to this place rather than evoking something that was not present. The lack of the specific material I was planning to use also pushed me to detach from my previous plans and to throw myself to the experience of the place itself.

Yet the landscape in Sierra de María-Los Vélez Natural Park is astonishingly beautiful, it has been suffering from centuries of human unsustainable occupation plus the consequences of climate change. The agricultural practices, such as monoculture farming, as well as the arid climate and lack of rains have been causing a severe process of desertification.

Amid that area, though, Cortijada Los Gázquez is a pole of renovation. Restored from an abandoned complex of five dwellings, the residence is constituted by bright and generous spaces, designed in resonance with local architectural tradition. The off-grid energy system makes use of the abundant sunlight and wind that characterise the site. Inside the house, the loving family members Donna, Simon, Sesame and Solomon make the artists-in-residency feel like home.

[1] ‘I don’t necessarily desire a perfect photography’. Interview by Alain Sayag (1981), in Robert Rauschenberg Photographs, Pantheon Books, New York.

[2] My practice as an artist is mostly based on research and perception of territories. Having a camera, an audio recorder and my body as main tools, I work across different media, including film, performance and installation. For the development of a new work, I would describe my research method as similar to Suely Rolnik’s definition of the cartographer’s practice. In her words, ‘the cartographer does not intend to explain or reveal. What they want is to dive into the geography of affects and to invent bridges of language to make their crossing. (My translation). Rolnik, S. (1989) Cartografia Sentimental: Transformações contemporâneas do desejo. São Paulo: Editora Estação Liberdade.

“No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes of photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars” (Mandel, 2015: 32)

I spent a fortnight in the company of the Beckmann family at El Cortijada de Los Gázquez (home of Joya: arte + ecología), in an alpine desert, living at 1000m above sea level in the Parque Natural Sierra María – Los Vélez. In the spring of 2016, I applied to the Art for the Environment International Residency Programme (AER) run by Professor Lucy Orta at the University of the Arts London. The award was for a number of research-led artist residencies to take place across the world for existing and recently graduated UAL students. I was about half way into my first year of a PhD programme at London College of Communication, studying within Creative Research into Sound Art Practice (CRiSAP) research centre.

What struck me about the opportunity to visit Los Gázquez was the idea of spending two weeks off-grid. Two weeks without. Two weeks disconnected. What might two weeks offline do for me? To me? What did off-grid mean? What kind of systems would be in place to live an off-grid sustainable life with a family (two adults, two children in a non-native country).

I was also interested in studying the environment of Los Gázquez as an off grid site. Far from any built up metropolitan centre, far from where I tend to spend most of my life, in the anthropogenic urban wash of cars, generators, ambulance sirens and helicopters, impossible to distinguish one source of noise from the next. I wondered what a rural and open landscape might offer as an alternative field to my listening and recording practice.

My application for the residency was based around some of my PhD research questions. My research is based around what I call ‘sonospheric investigations’ into media infrastructures. That is to say, that I try and listen to a whole gamut of frequencies, using air-borne and land-borne transducers, converting vibrations into digital signals that can then be converted into sound from loudspeakers. I centre this listening practice around the internal and external architecture of media infrastructures (data centres, fibre optic cable landing sites, satellite and telecommunication receivers etc). I am interested in how the Internet and its related infrastructures vibrate across the globe as a physical material network; the ‘medianatures’ of the Internet, to paraphrase Jussi Parikka.

At Los Gázquez, I wanted to experience being disconnected from the internet but I also wanted to study the infrastructure of an off grid site. Data Centres in particular are the hub for the global Internet network and as such are huge consumers of energy. Many of the world’s biggest companies operate them (Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft etc). They are a huge burden to the electrical grid of their surrounding area; it is estimated that they use an equivalent energy requirement to that of the aviation industry and as such, they are a significant site for ecological, socio-political and environmental concern, as well as a significant site of property rights, concepts of the self, the posthuman, the cyborg, the Anthropocene and of provenance and rights in the digital age.

My research led me to analyse the noise of such sites as representative of waste. The noise, generally being vibrations caused by industrial scale HVAC systems, fanning hot exhaust air into often cold climates (in the northern regions of Scandinavia for example).

Recently, I have been studying a site that Apple have been in protracted negotiations for over a year to build a data centre in. It is in the Derrydonnell forest in County Galway, Ireland, close to the small but well known medieval town of Athenry. Apple claim they will use exclusively 100% wind energy from the grid. I was confused but fascinated at such a claim given how estimates are that the data centre once fully operational is expected to require around 8% of the entire Irish grid’s energy allocation (more than the capital city Dublin).

And so I began to wonder what exactly does sustainability mean? What does sustainable energy mean? How sustainable is the technology used that is claimed to be ‘zero carbon’? Surely it is made full of components built as a result of intensive land destruction and mining; the production of rare earth minerals and metals for example to produce microchips, lithium-ion and lead batteries.

I am not interested in becoming a Luddite and thankfully neither are the Beckmann’s at Los Gázquez. They are interested in doing the best they can to maintain a good quality of life in as off-grid and sustainable way as they possibly can, investigating the possibilities of land reclamation, and returning to sustainable measures of living without burying their heads in the sand and without harking back to some kind of golden age that never existed. They are progressive and thoughtful about how they can make a positive and ecologically sensitive impact on Los Gázquez.

I spent most of my days field recording and creating a library of sounds, produced according to my own initial intrigue and then later, according to the sounds that the residents here associate with living in Los Gázquez. The library comprises goats, crickets, sheep, vultures, wind turbines, water pumps, photovoltaic panels, clay fizzing with water, children playing games, people eating dinner, flip flops across the concrete floor, diesel generators, a Land Rover, the silence on top of a mountain, electromagnetic noise from battery stores, electromagnetic interference from a phone attempting to connect to a distant and patchy 4G signal, helicopters, jumbo jets and much more. The collection of recordings put the environment at the centre of my thinking but I am thinking of the environment as the things that surround us as we exist. This is not a study of nature versus culture. For me the urban dweller, Los Gázquez and the surrounding area feels remote but the family home has electricity, Wi-Fi from a satellite uplink that connects to a suborbital network and bounces back to an exchange in Italy, and the landscape surrounding la Cortijada de Los Gázquez has signs of anthropogenic activity everywhere, from the terraced abandoned farm land to the water catchment systems, to the artificial walls and tributaries built within the Barrancos (water drainage, fluvial systems drawing down from the mountainside).

I have been on many walks into the relative ‘wilderness’ of the Parque Natural Sierra María on my own, taking a bearing and just going for it. Listening carefully to changes in sound, the flies, the trees, the wind, the nothingness, the everything-ness. I have recorded infrasonic vibrations with geophones, contact transducer microphones on vibrating bodies of metal, stereo microphone recordings of my position in the landscape and electromagnetic frequencies with coil-tap transducers. I’m not sure what to do with this collection other than listen to it and think about how it might relate to my other work on the urban and black site data centre spaces of my existing research. How does a site like this challenge my conceptions of isolation, off grid? How many miles do I need to travel in Ireland to locate somewhere away from any kind of anthropogenic noise like I can here… Let alone London?

Being disconnected from the internet… How I tried… How temptation pulled me back in… How on my fourth day, whilst marching up a mountain first thing in the morning, on my own, where I managed to see a fox, two vultures and an Ibex in their natural habitats, I became more intrigued by suddenly picking up a full strength 4G signal. How whilst thinking about life in a post-apocalyptic world, where petrol had gone stale, the grid was disconnected and the internet was just a myth, my field recorder started bleeping to the interference of a roaming mobile data signal and a sudden emergence of a low flying helicopter passed over me. How, even at my most isolated, I was never far away from signs of human activity, whether it be signs from the past 30-40 years or in the past 300-400 years. The marks were everywhere.

It has been an absolutely incredible experience. I look forward to working through my recordings and thoughts, and the journal that I have been keeping which I will publish on my website at www.earthkeptwarm.com over the coming weeks, with processed recordings, pictures and videos. A log of work in progress, a diary of thoughts, and a documentation of research activity in this dry, barren and utterly beautiful landscape.

I would like to extend my thanks to my hosts, Donna, Simon, Sesame and Solomon for being so welcoming. Their life here, as English expats, who have stepped up to a fascinating and difficult challenge of living in a radical and rural setting just north of the small town of Vélez-Blanco is truly inspirational. My thanks also go to the fellow artists and guests who have been here during my stay, Dayna, Elena, Melissa, Nana, Nigel, Anna, Peter and a special thanks to Abbie who without her… I wouldn’t have got completely lost one day when failing to find an ancient cave painting that was allegedly in plain sight.

Reference

Mandel, Emily St. John. (2015). Station Eleven. Picador, Pan Macmillan, London, UK.

Parikka, Jussi. (2015). A Geology of Media. Minnesota University Press, Minnesota, US.