photo Simon Beckmann

“Joya made  the words of Edmund Husserl make much more sense to me,

Bodies are given as having the sense of being earthly bodies and space is given as having the sense of earth - space. The totality of WE, of human beings or ‘animated beings’, is in this sense earthly and has no contrary in the non earthly. The earth is therefore neither just a globe (a body among many celestial bodies) nor just a spatial container for human life, but the horizon of the world and the precondition for sensation. 

The isolation, the connection with nature, the silence and the closeness to the stars, the crickets, the sunset theatre every 9:15 pm, the wind that became a sensible background sound and the vast landscape of the mountains reminded me how small we are in comparison to our surrounded earth and universe but at the same time the human intervention in a cooperation and inevitable connection to the landscape that could be felt so deeply. I could feel the earth, I could feel life and dryness co-existing and I could pay attention to it. I did  many walks to observe it, shared many chats to describe it, spent a lot of time doing nothing but being in sync with it - with out any guilt of not being productive, It felt so important and pure to do this. 

Simon and Donna’s house felt like home. Like an invite to come and bring us back again  to the basic notions of belonging. We shared chats, life stories, dinners, laughs, sensitive talks and and a vibe and energy not too easy to find. A remembrance of how innovative but yet pure humans can be and remain. I should mention the amazing food Donna prepared for us and Simon’s music that was adding the right note for us to feel so engaged to the place and to each other. 

I developed work that  emerged in a very natural and intuitive manner  from the thoughts that nature is not a site that is subjected to human signification. Nature cannot be contained within, or reproduced as, an artwork, the earth appears as a temporal or sensorial plethora at the limit of representational form. 

Using the land as a sculptural medium, I looked into earth art a lot, something that initiated to me an interrogation of how the elusive presence of nature problematizes the drive to represent. I was drawn to contradictions, to natural sculptures I could find around and the visual metaphors and the ironies they brought out to me. That of course after I gave meaning to them through the way I looked at them, and that itself became part of the work.  I could feel that I was trying to find ways to interpret the place in my mind yet I was also trying to understand all the circles and connections that I could make to the human body. I remembered why humans are part of nature, something we usually forget just because we usually work against it. 

The results challenged the way I usually produce work concluding to a combination of elements like  post-minimalist sculpture to body art performances, installation and photographic/spatial interventions.  

obra - Nasia Papavasiliou @joyaair

Joya: AiR, found a way to immediately get me back in touch to my senses and then my practice. Two elements that shouldn’t be separated, and that was a great reminder. 

The sunset meeting point was a great example of how similar we all are, and how as simple as that, we all have something in common, we are observers who may have come from different parts of the world yet the sun and the moon will always be understood the same way. 

Joya: AiR, muchisimas gracias”. 

Nasia Papavasiliou

Nasia is a Greek Cypriot performance practitioner and graduate of Central Saint Martins college of Art and Design in MA Performance Design and Practice. She is currently a Teaching and Learning Assistant tutor for the equivalent BA course of Performance at CSM. Her research and practice is site-specific and she studies the artistic representations of lived experiences in different locations. Her work looks into how these can help to identify thought processes, make critical interventions and engage in conversation about social structures.
Her practice is based on a socio-anthropological methodology that relies on ethnographic fieldwork methods and participant and (or) personal observation positioning. She creates both theatre and gallery based work, whilst she uses both outdoor and urban spaces. Her most recent works were shown and exhibited in London (Zabludowicz collection, Barbican Centre and Platform Theatre King's Cross), Athens (Metaxourghion Theatre) and Cyprus (Point Centre of Contemporary Art).

A Performance To Camera-as text-as songs-as movement

"Pressure sensors in the feet communicate instantly with the brain, internal organs and other body parts, in extreme danger the feet must be prepared to participate in fleeing, they do this by processing environmental information gathered through the soles, helping the brain to determine how much oxygen to release, over time this communication speeds up and allows us to adapt to the rhythm of running.

Can traces of history and past events be found in our nervous system and in our muscles, can we discover these through movement?

This landscape demands that I give way to instinct and surrender to its pulse.

According to Lamarck genetic assimilation allows an animals response to environmental stress to become a fixed part of its developmental repertoire so that characteristics formed in a given environment can be inherited and retained, even outside of the conditions of that environment, Lamarck calls this phenotypic plasticity.

Knowing this landscapes requires knowing my body, a coordination of eyes and feet, even whilst watching the sky and the land, whilst calling out, sounding the mountain, sounding the well. I walk through clumps of silence, startling. I strategise over grains and potential scores, of dividing space, documenting human interventions, measuring the distance between trees and equalising space with a grid, offering a segment to the other artists...does this landscape choreograph me?

A fugue is a contra-punctual composition in which a short melody or phrase is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving parts

Or it is a loss of awareness of ones identity, often coupled with a flight from ones usual environment

There are bee's drowning at the old well. There is a trough with a plastic tube that runs into a bath, its a hot day but there is ice floating in the tub, it fixes the bees in a curving pattern that oscillates to the hum of those flocking to the water that pours from the arched mound of mud and bricks, through the tube, flooding the trough, into the tub., they circle with a low drone.

I keep walking, consuming every old stump, the shape of the dry wood, grains, almond shells, mounds of soil sitting in pyramids next to the shallow ditches, formed in their creation, one has a thick wadge of coarse bush protruding 

I pick up the sole of the heel of a shoe, a heavy sole, turned on in its side, you could say it was the shape of the mounds of the hills in the middle distance and the lumpy protruding old well, all formed with an arching top and a flat base.

Dung in the dining room, dung on the floor, the floor made of dung, dung surrounding the decrepit remains of a manger, climbing onto hardened dung, hearing the beetles tunnelling through, corroding, consuming, digging down, removing 8 tons of dung, collecting  it and drying it up then grinding it into a fine dust, cracking an egg through your hands to form a fine paint.

The weather report states that there is a 100% probability of rain, a deluge, it will fill up the fields and run down the barrancos and into the ramblers and off to the sea".

Hazel Dowling