photo Simon Beckmann

‘In August, you arrive at a radiant homestead on yellow terrain, roam along fertile fields, scramble up a mountain, find light seeping through small cracks in dark rock, see seeds everywhere and nowhere, once buried and wind tossed. Semi-arid, yes, and wholly aromatic this place: lavender and thyme, pine and rosemary.

What more? Before the conceptualizing and narrating, there is the still mind. One that is tranquil, observing. Undisturbed and unencumbered. What you hoped for. Time to revise and edit and you do, fastened for hours to the page and the screen. You return to a story about memory and a father’s journey. You trace the making of identities and communities in a small Alaskan town. (The silence here connects you to the woods of your childhood home.)

By the late afternoon, a delirious wind slams shut the bedroom shutter, begging you to nap, but you stay awake in those fiery hours in a kind of trance until a cowbell rings. Close the notebook and the laptop. Set down the pen. Follow the clang downstairs. Your frenzied appetite, which has taken over, is filled by stunning bounty, bowls of white bean puree, ripe red garden tomatoes and pasta, savory onion pizza and hummus (and more and more). Seconds? Thirds? Yes, please!

Talk around the table with your cohort of wondrous creatives dips into origins and accents, family lore, that (or the next) day’s hike, the humorous and the intimate. You learn of the host’s arduous and, thankfully, successful efforts to locate water underground and bring it up, up and into the house and around the farm. In this history of viability, persistence is vital. Water is everything. 

“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was,” observes Toni Morrison. This luminary passed just days earlier and you wonder more deeply about her words and this place, about extracting memory like water from the ground.

When an inky sky arrives, so do the Swan, the Great Bear, the Harp. (You’ve identified them on your phone’s app!) Music streams from inside out, the DJ youth favoring Spanish trap and reggaeton. We drink water, sip wine, mountains melting into black. Look up again. At bright Saturn. The daylight’s buzzing wasps gone now, replaced by cricket song, cats skittering along wall tops and roof edges, laughter rising”.

​​​​​Nita Noveno

Hey, JOYA: Simon, Donna, Soli, Sessi; my fellow residents/artists/explorers: Zoe, Claudia, Alessandra, Simon L., Kazumi, Sylvia, Thibault, Samra, Rich, Jaron, Delia, and Susanne ;furry, four-legged friends, Frida and Fou Fou; the grand Sierra Maria - Los Vélez, sunsets blazing, mantises praying, agua fresca y corriente, muchas gracias y abrazos!

Nita Noveno teaches composition and literature at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. She is a graduate of The New School MFA Creative Writing Program and the founder and co-host of Sunday Salon(sundaysalon.com), a long-running monthly reading series in NYC. Nita writes about memory, culture, identity, and immigrant lives. Her work has appeared in Kweli, About Place Journal, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s Open City Magazine, among other publications. Originally from Southeast Alaska, she lives in Queens, New York.

photo Simon Beckmann

“I've flown to Joya: AiR from London with an open mind. I wanted to relax, refresh and escape from my city life. Having done an art residency at Walthamstow Wetlands in London which stores around 40% of the water that will arrive in peoples' taps after cleaning I wondered, what the landscape could be like in a desert environment? I wanted to know how the land and its' habitat is affected by the driest spells of Andalusien summer. The next day I arrived the temperature has climbed to the 40 degrees celsius! I'd never been in such heat before (apart from the dry sauna).

During my three weeks of research I indulged in lots of sunrise and sunset walks, birdwatching, insect watching (and escaping from if I were chased by a fly), goat walking, rock formations scanning, barranco exploring, mostly avoiding the deep midday heat, fossil hunting and looking for marks of any other animals left behind. Most of my curiosities were tickled by learning about the alpine desert landscape I was set deeply within. I'm a sculptor. I had to bring some of this sun-scorched landscape with me indoors to an art studio. Canvas bags full of soil and clay in three different colours were so exciting to work with and desperately heavy to carry in. Full of minerals and colour, the soil helped me to produce dozens of prints on paper. Another line of inquiry in my research had taken a turn by chance. When I planted linseeds as an experiment, something has happened. Hundreds of forest ants queued up for the seeds and have been simply taking them away down their hole! Leaving the mud marks behind as they were pulling the seeds, they produced delicate drawings.

I'm back now in London. I can reflect back at my summer and it's clear to me, this art residency not only has given me a chance to play without any guilt or time constraint but also has changed my aesthetic sensibilities. I see the world differently. I need the white rocky walls or sun-bleached sedimentary rock, I need more of the green, and I need more clarity and more open space. In my mind and in my life, however dramatic this may sound. Thank you, Joya, so much for having me there and sharing with me your world. Thanks a million!

Silvia Krupinska

http://cargocollective.com/silviakrupinska

Silvia Krupinska is a London-based sculptor of Slovak origin. She moved to London in 1999, studied Fine Art at Chelsea School of Art and Design, UAL (grad. 2006) and took an MA Art and Science at Central Saint Martins College, UAL (grad. 2016). 
She has exhibited internationally, including in an EU-Art-Network exhibition in Palazzo Albrizzi, The Venice Biennale 2009 and I've also participated in a number of shows and art symposiums in Austria, Germany, Azerbaijan and Slovakia. 

photo Simon Beckmann

“The light, the light, the light…

“Everything is always in the process of becoming and perishing and never really is” 

– Plato’s Timaeus, John Bowker, God - A Very Short Introduction, p17

At Joya: AIR the days seem to stretch themselves out, from one into the other.

I enjoyed the seclusion of the house in the open hills and mountains, quiet and very lively at the same time. I was surprised to learn the landscape is a desert, while yet so green, beautiful, but not an easy landscape for me to photograph. Within my project When Is A Mountain, I was looking for something particular and this wasn’t within my grasp. A challenge. But the landscape always gives something, so I embraced it as it is while making photographs and video’s of parts of hills and mountains, with the stillness of the softly moving ‘moody trees’. 

Besides the environment, Joya: AIR was perfect for me to work on another part of the same project. In the ever-blazing sun I could make my little studio outside and - with the elements of the landscape - make landscape type images of stones I brought with me from previous travels. Joya AIR was also perfect to experiment with making sequences, to take the time to photograph the movement of light and shadow on the mountains and stones during the course of a day.

Simon and Donna’s house is gorgeous, everything made with great attention, passion and consideration. They’re very welcoming and my fellow artists were great. We had good talks and laughs and interesting presentations. A joyful experience! And every day I saw the sun rise from my bedroom window and enjoyed the sunsets; both gorgeous and never really the same”.

Claudia den Boer (NL)

27/08/2019

Claudia den Boer (NL, 1979) studied visual arts and got her BA in photography at art academy AKV| St.Joost and holds a teachers degree from art academy ABV. Her first long-term personal project Anchors (2016) was made into a photo book, designed by Rob van Hoesel and published by The Eriskay Connection. It was presented at Breda Photo 2016 and was part of the Experimental Book Platform by Punto de Fuga during Paris Photo 2016. In 2017 her work was selected for the collection of FotoFilmic/PULP Gallery in Vancouver (CA). The book has been exhibited at photofestival Naarden (NL), Athens Photo Festival (GR), I Book Show in Brighton (UK) and in St.Petersburg (RU). Claudia participated in two desert AIR-programs; the New Mexican desert (US, 2013) and the Sahara (MA, 2015) and was selected to take part in ISSP (LV) in 2016. Claudia received a partial grand in 2017 for a working period at International Art Residency Can Serrat (ES) where she started working on her new personal project ‘When is a mountain’ and in 2018 travelled to the Georgian Caucasus for this work in progress.

Claudia also likes to collaborate in multi disciplinary projects. In the past she worked with architectural firm Ontwerplab (NL) on research project and publication Verborgen Stad (Hidden City). In 2016 she started collaborating with choreographer Katja Grässli (CH/NL) and became artistic partner of Foundation MoveToMeet. MoveToMeet was funded by Makersfonds (2017), P.B. Cultuurfonds (2017 and 2018) and Impulsgelden (2018) and are working on two long-term projects: project Stil Geluid (Silent Sound) on the subject of silence and intercultural project and collaboration with dancers Beh Chin Lau (MY) and Natalie Wagner (CH/DE) and cultural philosopher Marc Colpaert (BE) titled Cataract. In both of these projects she expands her photography to the space of the decor of the dance performances.

photo Simon Beckmann

‘La relación con el tiempo que estableces al llegar a JOYA: AiR es tangible y contradictoria: por un lado, el tiempo se suspende como si quedaras atrapado en el frame de una película y, a su vez, los días pasan con una rapidez abrumadora. Esta ruptura con la cronología habitual de nuestras rutinas, da lugar a un ritmo vital alternativo cuyo motor es el equilibrio con la naturaleza. 

Estar una semana en una casa, un entorno y con una gente maravillosa sabe a poco. JOYA: AiR ha sido una experiencia inolvidable en todos los aspectos y cuando vas por primera vez ya estás pensando en el siguiente proyecto que harás cuando vuelvas. La Cortijada Los Gázquez está a tan solo unas horas de Málaga, ciudad donde resido, pero las conversaciones con los compañeros, las cenas en grupo, los paseos por los senderos y la montaña, la infinita tranquilidad… me han permitido escuchar y ver un universo nuevo y sugerente. 

En este entorno del Parque Natural Sierra María-Los Vélez, la naturaleza deja claro que no tiene límites. Asistes como humilde observador a un escenario en el que todo se intensifica y los tonos ocres, amarillos y verdes del campo existen en un tipo de belleza que no se puede captar. Recuerdo la emoción que sentí al llegar a la cima de Sierra Gigante: después de una hora de subida llegué al punto de mayor altitud, giré sobre mi misma en un ángulo de 360° y entendí la grandeza de lo que me rodeaba. Apenas se pueden ver un par de pueblos a lo lejos, y entonces las montañas, campos, árboles, el cielo, te cuentan su historia en silencio. 

Al principio de mi estancia estaba escribiendo e investigando una serie de nociones relacionadas con el movimiento, el cuerpo y la materia, pero los paseos por los alrededores de la casa transformaron, casi sin darme cuenta, las letras en acciones. Andar, escalar, ver, caminar sobre trigo, rocas o barro seco. Estos recorridos que hice desde el primer día, fueron el punto de partida para el proyecto que realicé. Me di cuenta de que el propio acto de caminar e intentar recorrer distintos terrenos hacía conectar mi cuerpo de un modo muy especial con el entorno. No se trataba de andar por una calle, de un edificio a otro, en línea recta, sino que tenía que ver con escuchar  la materialidad del suelo que pisaba y responderante las necesidades. Los campos de cardos, las zonas montañosas con piedras, cada una me llevaba a estar haciendo y siendo de distintas formas. Comencé a interesarme entonces por aprehender todos los matices que surgían en la interacción entre cuerpo y terreno/espacio natural. Capté por un lado los movimientos de las piernas, los brazos, la flexión de las articulaciones, el esfuerzo de los músculos, la dirección de la mirada y, por otro, el tiempo que tardaba en recorrer cada espacio, las emociones, ideas o palabras que surgían en el proceso. A partir de este estudio de campo, realicé una serie de grabaciones en vídeo y de dibujos que están a medio camino entre las instrucciones para entender dichos espacios y la documentación de una suerte de performance que no podemos saber muy bien si es real o imaginaria. 

Tener a Simon y Donna como anfitriones ha sido uno de los mayores placeres. El paisaje y la casa te hacen sentir especial, pero ellos han conseguido cultivar un entorno acogedor en el que no dudas en querer implicarte. Su proyecto vital, que entiende la cultura como agente fundamental en la ecología y conservación del medio ambiente, es inspirador. Vivir en una casa sostenible e independiente basada en técnicas tradicionales, ha sido una gran oportunidad. Toda esta energía positiva y renovadora hacen a JOYA un lugar ideal para investigar, experimentar y sentir. 

Muchas gracias a JOYA: AiR por una experiencia que ha sido pura belleza y que espero pronto volver a disfrutar. 

Delia Boyano 

https://deliaboyano.wixsite.com/site

photo Simon Beckmann

Joya: AiR / After the Experience 

‘There is something absolutely special about Joya: AiR. I will try to translate into words, although there is so much that I will not be able to capture. In fact, I believe this may define the essence of what I lived there: it being beyond what can be narrated, almost a rare quality of pure experience. 

 On the way to Los Gázquez (home of Joya: AiR) from Vélez Rubio, that’s where my residency began. The roads and the views are breathtaking, they tell you already of beautiful things to come. Los Gázquez is an enchanted place, so calm and peaceful, yet so vibrant. The way I remember it is as an encounter: with your own self, with others, with nature. I felt at home from the very moment I arrived. 

I came to Joya: AiR with the desire to engage physically with the process of painting and try acrylic and pastels on large-scale paper. One of the reasons I paint is to set concepts, reasoning, and judgment aside. Those define my life as a philosophy professor. Abstract painting takes me into a different territory. I wanted to work from within the painting and I wanted to let things happen, just listening, living, and responding to whatever I would have felt when honestly placed in front of nature. That was my project, and so much more has happened. 

I spent my time as it unveiled, naturally. There were no constraints, no expectations. I found myself producing much more than I ever expected. There was an energy in the space, in the silence, in the interactions, in the conversations that inspired me endlessly. It was an inner urgency, an urgency without urgency. The studio I was offered was a sacred space, so beautiful. I just loved my time spent there, I felt as living within the process of creation. 

I got to Joya: AiR with a creative project and I found myself into much more and much higher than the mine. Time there has been a time for reflection on how to live, a reminder of how effortless and rich life can be, if lived and savoured in all its simplicity. 

Time gets back to lived time, as opposed to clock time. Nature gets back to all its majesty and power. Things get back to their thingness. Labels get stripped and you encounter nature for what it is. A tree, a road, a sunset, a stone, a sound, the wind, the moon, they are back to be what they are. Nature regains its sublimity.

I remember very vividly the awe and respect, the exhilaration, but also the uneasiness and discomfort, and even the pain I felt just looking at nature. At times, a sunset was too much to take in. It has been such an awakening and humbling experience just to be there. There is something absolutely humbling and unifying about taking walks in pure solitude or having dinner with your new friends under a sky full of stars. It is a strong sense of belonging. 

Donna and Simon: Thank you for your warmth and your generosity, your inspiring conversations and our laughs, and the fabulous, fabulous dinners.  

Thank you to all the beautiful and generous artists, my companions in this adventure. I owe you so much. I am so deeply grateful for all the time and the experiences we shared. I felt as living in an embrace. 

I hope to be back one day. Thank you from my deepest heart’. 

Alessandra Stradella

M.A. in Philosophy at Georgia State University (2002), and a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Emory University (2008). Assistant Professor in Philosophy with a specialisation in Philosophy of Art at Philadelphia since 2008. 

March 2019, awarded the third prize for Abstract Painting at the Annual Exhibition at Fleisher Art Memorial, Philadelphia. 2019 participated to the Collective Exhibit, Art et Al., Da Vinci Art Alliance, Philadelphia, PA.

Publications in Academia: “Performance Art and the Seduction of Theatricality,” Philosophy Study, 2012, “The Fiction of the Standard of Taste: David Hume on the Social Constitution of Beauty,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 2012, “On Grief: An Aesthetic Defense,” Philosophical Practice, 2011, “The Dramatic Nature of Our Selves: David Hume and the Theatre Metaphor,” Literature and Aesthetics, 2010. 

photo Simon Beckmann

”My first plan to spend time at Joya: AiR was to look back my photos from the past, and select and edit from there. It’s easy for me to just keep taking photos, but not really spend time to look what I have.

Presentation became huge help on this process, and I could find different prospective on my work.

It was more than just work, I am able to find myself from other direction.

Because of conversations with other artists, witnessing their creations, approach to the work, their endless curiosity and passion brought me deeper understanding for my work and myself. It showed me freedom and expansion in creation, and gave me new theme and inspirations. It was such a gift, it almost some sort of healing. Time in Joya: AiR was more than I expected”.

Kazumi Sakurai

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).

photo Simon Beckmann

"Consciously designed landscapes which mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature." -David Holmgren.

“My time at Joya: AiR was an authentic, beautiful and tranquil experience from the scenery, to the people, to the day to day living. Joya AiR was a perfect time for me to reflect and work at my own pace after the pressures of University.

Within the unspoilt landscapes of Los Gázquez (Joya: AiR), I explored natural forms and shapes, observing and appreciating the details, and directly interacting with my surroundings through printmaking and other mixed media processes. Getting to know other creatives and their working processes was an insightful and exciting part of the studio environment.

Walking down to the riverbed was my favourite place to discover, where it felt like time had stood still and watching Pepe the shepherd herd the goats and sheep of a day was a beautiful escape from busy modern life. As such I became conscious of the history of the Cortijada Los Gázquez which created a magical atmosphere during my stay, mindful of life that had lived and breathed here before.

It was so inspiring to see how Simon and Donna put a sustainable and off-grid lifestyle into practice down to every detail. Part of my research here was observing the ecological systems put into play, which is something I will take away with me as an on-going project.

Thank you Simon and Donna for the most wonderful experience”!

Lucy Topp

https://lucytopp.myportfolio.com

photo Simon Beckmann

Ten sunsets (each distinct)

An electrical storm tracking north across the valley.

An excess of light

Stars (to begin) like I have rarely seen. After dinner, head thrown back

Then, the moon. White clay floodlit.

Walking the barranco, uncoiling westward. 

White dust, soft rock, Aleppo Pine.

Space and time to think. Or not.

The sound of goat-bells.

Easy silences.

(and ping pong)

- Thank you Simon and Donna for creating such a welcoming space 

(and the wonderful meals!)

www.johngalvinartist.com

photo Simon Beckmann

"I’m a sculptor and practice-based PhD student, researching the meaning that is embodied in material, and the ways in which it can absorb social and political narratives. My sculptures investigate the treatment and consumption of bodies, theories, objects and artworks. 

I came to Joya: AiR to explore and examine ways in which raw material can reveal itself in completed artworks, overflowing from the finished product as opposed to disappearing into the surface. This is important in my work, as my sculptures intend to demonstrate that material cannot be completely controlled but rather resists our intentions and, in doing so, influences our social behaviour. 

I studied the earth around Joya: AiR, which is composed of beautiful silky clay. It is stark white, soft beige, salmon pink and coffee brown. It is velvet sand and hard stone. Rather than making, I spent my time here capturing the various ways the clay around me reacted to my interventions.  I immersed myself in this material, examining the ways it could be smeared with water, kneaded into dough or crumbled into dust between fingers. I documented the different forms, colours and states it existed in. I also recorded my observations and transcribed them, creating a text based work which reflected the materiality of the clay in written language. 

Navigating this landscape increased my awareness of the material around me, and drew attention to the ways in which our encounters with it can shape our understanding of the world. From this research, I have developed strategies for drawing out the materiality of substances, which I will bring back to my studio in order to represent material as temperamental, messy and unexpected in my finished sculptures."

Ellie Barrett

photo Simon Beckmann

“Experiencing the drought of a desert-like landscape certainly deepens appreciation for water. 

This was among the first realisations I had during my stay with Donna & Simon. They kindly invited me to spend a few days in their tranquil home which bears a charm difficult to describe. 

In the seclusion of Joya: AiR many things have fallen into place for me. 

Since I am questioning the materialistic aspects of my lifestyle I was hoping to get a glimpse of a verified more sustainable approach just as well as room for letting my mind wander and for finding the muse to pick up a drawing pencil again. Joya: AiR turned out to provide the perfect setting for all of that: A spacious exploration area free of schedules while full of opportunities; peacefully embedded in untouched wilderness. 

The harsh conditions for nature would suggest absence of diversity, but the opposite is the case. The air is filled with vibrancy of humming bees and flies, and there was another soothing sound that attracted my attention since the moment I arrived – the wind turbine. This turbine is an essential power source feeding Joya: AiR and its guests with electricity and is just one example of the thought-through concept which implements the natural constraints and benefits given in that area.

I explored the scenery with all my senses. Visually, I grasped the vegetation while going for walks and hikes, supplied with a sketchbook or my camera. Thereby eagles, rabbits and a fox have crossed my path. The odours of dry grass, wild rosemary and pine trees were omnipresent; the taste buds were tickled every night by a delicious food creation. Los Gázquez is also tactile as the ground is based on clay and can be turned into anything imaginable upon moisturising. 

So while my body sunk into a mode of pure relaxation, the brain remained stimulated due to lively exchange of thoughts, worries and ideas with multifaceted artists who were sharing time with me at this distinct place. I got highly inspired to immerse myself further into the artistic world and motivated to work on my personal contribution when it comes to downsizing the threat we pose to our environment. The impact may be a small one, but I hope to become a seed for friends, family and local communities to follow a less destructive path and strengthen awareness. Joya: AiR, made a lasting impression. The spark leaped over”. 

Tatjana Hirschmugl

Tatjana is a research scientist holding a Masters degree from the University of Vienna. She currently works as a laboratory assistant at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Lung Vascular Research in Graz. Previously she worked as a research assistant at CeMM Research Centre for Molecular Medicine in Vienna. Her research interests are the genetics of malignant and immune system disorders.

She also has a strong background & knowledge of  fluorescence microscopy, next-generation sequencing techniques, human genetics, and an advanced application of graphic design/image processing tools.

photo Simon Beckmann

For Joya: AIR I created two new pieces: 1) One for Each Hand consists of two stones cased in crochet. Initially, I intended to place them in trees. As I became familiar with them as objects that comfortably fit into one’s hands, though, it became obvious that they invite some kind of a task (e.g., weighing, throwing, juggling). The gauging of the right action makes them “land art pieces for one body at a time,” playfully interacting with our surroundings. As opposed to traditional land art, which often aims at grand interventions, One for Each Hand puts forth a more direct relationship between body and land.

‘one for each hand’ Richard Jochum

2) Speaks for Itself, a temporary installation, consists of five shopping bags attached to a tree branch. The plastic bags, icons of an unsustainable life form, conjure up the motto of the Joya residency: art + ecology. As a gesture, they are simple: arranged in one neat line and floating in the wind, they project calm and peace rather than what they have come to represent: decades of waste. Both sides co-exist.  

‘speaks for itself’ Richard Jochum

The two pieces are based on materials readily available at this desert-residency site and the bodily constraints that I brought with me during this time (shoulder injury), which limited the radius of my actions. With great thanks to the residency hosts Simon and Donna Beckmann and my fellow residents for their support, particularly Tatjana Hirschmugl for teaching me to crochet and Michael Aspli for performing”. 

 -----

Richard Jochum PhD MFA

Associate Professor of Art and Art Education

Teachers College, Columbia University

http://richardjochum.net

http://ctc.tc.columbia.edu

http://tc.columbia.edu/arted

photo Simon Beckmann

‘Being removed from the pressure to produce and present any outcome in the end, I was able to take time to listen to my intuition in order to understand which creative direction to take next when I am back from the residency. These two weeks were crucial for me to realise how much I used to be driven by my noisy rational mind in any creative pursuits. So I spent most of the studio time doing intuitive drawings with oil pastels listening to my body and being driven by inner impulses, dismissing any reasoning that came from my conscious mind. The process of making these drawings was very helpful for my creative self-liberation because I shifted my focus and put more value into the actual process rather than the outcome.

Every day I spent some time hiking, connecting with the unique environment and biodiversity of Sierra María-Los Vélez, meditating outside. I took the opportunity of being surrounded by so many plant species unknown to me to document the variety of shapes I found, so I can use this vocabulary of plant forms in my future projects.

Studio time and time spent in nature was of great healing importance to me but the interactions and conversations with people I met in Joya: AiR were equally transformative. Every dinner meal shared together was nourishing for the body and mind. Simon and Donna’s impressive efforts put into creating such a place and caring for the land made me expand my understanding of possible ways an artist can contribute to the restoration and healing of damaged and/or abandoned environments’.

Nadya Eidelstein www.nadyscreatures.com

Nadya Eidelstein is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in Toronto, Canada. She received her BA from Central Saint Martins, London, UK. ​Since graduation she has been working on the border between machine-made and handmade approaches, trying to define what makes these ways of making different, how they are similar, and how to blur the definitions of man-made and computer-made.

photo Simon Beckmann

Milla Eastwood

Reflections In Sierra Maria - Los Vélez

Contained within this body are the veins of the yellow Vella Spinosa, the mothering Winds and energies of Time. Sinking into the stillness, movements become sounds. Observing the voices of parched grey roots and the graceless tread of beetles. There is a quality in the air, encouraging us to slow our pace. Reaching the zenith of the mountain. Existence here, gives a sense of wholeness. Reminding us of the spheres Oneness. 

Milla Eastwood 

"Then as I leaned, listening, a bud of light seemed to form and expand within me, opening and opening, wider and faster; and the brilliance increased and I was filled with waves of light until I bore within myself a shining universe, worlds of splendour; and through them the wind still blew, another, yet the same wind that blew over the external earth and sky, fusing their outwardness with this world within."

Borrowed from my great grandmother Dorothea Eastwood, Valleys Of Springs.

https://www.millaeastwood.com/

​Milla Eastwood completed her BA ​in Fine Art: Painting ​from Wimbledon College of Arts, London, UK ​and her Foundation CCW from Camberwell College of Arts, London UK. Selected exhibitions in London include ​solo shows Cable Salad and Drunk On Colour, The Dot Project​​ Gallery; group shows include​ Love In A Cold Climate, The Dot Project Gallery; Mark Shand's Adventures and Curiosities, Hauser and Wirth​.

photo Simon Beckmann

 “As we continue to map, network, and compute the foreseeable future, we neglect to transmit new ways of thinking between the past and present. Uncertainty mars our ability to think through analogy and metaphor. Finding solutions only resolve finite problems. As we attempt to  articulate and decipher an outcome, another moment has passed. Our natural world is now rejecting, rapidly mutating and disrupting our built environments. We must look behind, ahead, around and through in order to reorganize and rearrange. Time, distance, and space now longer become appendages to the conscious.  Time fractures, breaks and falls in-between the scales. Prior to arriving and since leaving Los Gázquez (Joya: AiR) I've been thinking about present time and all of its dimensions. In the poem entitled, The Century— Vek Moi, Osip Mendelstam writes:

So long as the creature lives

it must carry forth its vertebrae,

as the waves play along

with an invisible spine.

Like a child’s tender cartilage

is the century of the newborn earth.

To wrest the century away from bondage

so as to start the world anew

one must tie together with a flute

the knees of all the knotted days.

/But your backbone has been shattered

O my wondrous, wretched century.

With a senseless smile

Like a beast once limber

you look back, weak and cruel,

to contemplate your own tracks.

Osip Mendelstam “The Century (Vek Moi)” extracted from Giorgio Agamben “What Is the Contemporary?” (Stanford University Press, 2009)  pg. 42-43.

Andrew Obernesser’s work investigates myth, meaning, and animism through the process of constructing synthetic ecologies. By the process of object making and writing, Obernesser explores what forms of communication and information are being exchanged among the living and nonliving, what narratives are being ascribed between ancient lifeforms and inanimate objects.

Obernesser graduated with a BA in Art from Colorado College in 2017. He attended Virginia Commonwealth University’s  Sculpture + Extended Media  Summer Studio Program in 2017. He currently lives in works in Chicago, Illinois. 

photo Simon Beckmann

“I climbed up a mountain today and came back down altered, thinking like a mountain…” notebook excerpt day 8, Joya:AiR residency

“I am a lens based artist exploring earth matters, the push pull of the human/nature dialogue, and our Western lost sense of relationship and reciprocity with the animate natural world.

 It is an embodied practice that is in conversation with sensuous encountering from the space in between – walking with my camera and feeling my way into the non-human world around us, in touch with our nested relationship with the planet, and its with us. As such, I felt that Los Gázquez, the home of Joya: AiR, would be an incredible opportunity, and I was not disappointed. From my arrival to the morning I left 10 days later, when the mountains were cloaked in smoky low cloud laying thick dew over the parched landscape, I was enthralled. Simon and Donna welcome artists into their beautifully restored cortijada and together they nurture a collective spirit of exploration, creative endeavour and community stimuli.

 The house is a cool, white flowing space beautifully crafted and decorated where you can find stillness and quiet to work or rest; and then in the evenings a real sense of community emerges with the other residents; I had so many fascinating and stimulating conversations before, during and after the always excellent dinners. Simon and Donna have created a place that just holds and nurtures you, with a strong sense of community that also enables you to make work without distraction; it is a rare combination. 

Each day I would wake up excited by the potential of making. The off-grid remoteness of Los Gázquez instills a sense of peace and calm, enabling you to be within the quiet space of the present untempered by memory and desire. Working at a primal level, I was drawn immediately to the hot, bone white limestone space of the barranco below the cortijada, a fluvial gorge, deep cut, snaking its dry way down the valley, redolent of a huge boiling, rushing and tumbling and roaring mass of water that carries with it rocks boulders, sediment, fossils, tree roots, carving and scratching and gouging out new paths and gullies as it forces its way through the landscape. Now it is almost completely dry and still, save for a few pools higher up that were harbouring strings of black pearls, the beautiful expression of toad spawn. There is a spell that the place casts, and I feel it still, strange beauty and total peace save for the wind in the pines that pepper the landscape above, and birdsong, burning white hot powdered limestone, baked, cracked, moulded, so primal, like the primordial soup we humans climbed out of eons back. Embracing the immediate, unexplored ecologies of the present, untempered by the disconnecting force of language, I was able to work in the utterness of solitude in the thickness of the present in the hot white space of the barranco. I encountered a landscape that returned the strength of my gaze, that I struggled with at times, and where the magic spell of love, of falling, entered my veins enabling me to go deeper and deeper into connecting. 

I do not know yet whether the mass of work I made whilst I was there will translate into a body of work that resonates with others, but I feel, sense that it might. I always need time, lived time to give me distance from any making experience. I can then begin to tease out the various side tributaries that I followed and dig into the core of the work. Whatever the outcome, I know that my experience at Los Gázquez has altered me slightly at tectonic level, like the barranco after a fresh deluge, my banks and bedrock have been shifted…and for that I am very grateful. Thank you Simon and Donna, my fellow artists Sissel, Andrew, Milla and Suzana; and of course Frida the giant schnauzer”. 

Gin Rimmington Jones

http://ginrimmingtonjones.com/

Gin Rimmington Jones, is a photographic artist based in Brighton, UK

2016-2018 MA in Photography at the University of Brighton

photo Simon Beckmann

“What best describes my stay at Joya: AiR is this passage written be David Abram, so I will borrow his words:

“To my animal body, the rock is first and foremost another body engaged in the world: as I turn my gaze toward it, I encounter not a defined and inanimate chunk of matter but an upturned surface basking in the sun’s warmth, or a pink and sharp- edged structure protruding from the ground like the shattered bone of the hillside, or an old and watchful guardian of this land — a resolute and sheltering presence inviting me now to crouch and lean my spine against it.

Each thing organizes the space around it, rebuffing or sidling up against other things; each thing calls, gestures, beckons to other beings or battles them for our attentions; things expose themselves to the sun or retreat among the shadows, shouting with their loud colors or whispering with their seeds; rocks snag lichen spores from the air and shelter spiders under their flanks; clouds converse with the fathomless blue and metamorphose into one another; they spill rain upon the land, which gathers in rivulets and carves out canyons; skyscrapers slice the winds and argue with one another over the tops of townhouses; backhoes and songbirds are coaxed into duets by the percussive rhythm of the subway beneath the street. Things “catch our eye” and sometimes refuse to let go; they “grab our focus” and “capture our attention”, and finally release us from their grasp only to dissolve back into the overabundant world. Whether ecstatic or morose, exuberant or exhausted, everything swerves and trembles; anguish, equanimity, and pleasure are not first internal moods but passions granted to us by the capricious terrain.”

Excerpt from “Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology” by David Abram - Alliance for Wild Ethics 2011.

Sissel Thastum is a visual artist working with photography, video and sound. She is currently based in Trondheim, Norway, where she is taking her masters at Trondheim Academy of Fine Art.
Her current work evolves around the notion of kinship, care and belonging between species; sentient and non-sentient beings. Through the mediums of moving images and sound the work explores (re)connection to nature and its sensing language, and how we might be able to learn and exchange through this natural language.

In 2013 She initiated and co-founded the art organisation The Independent AIR, which arranges exhibitions, artist talks, artist residencies, workshops and cultural events in Silkeborg, Denmark and internationally. Between 2014 and 2017 The Independent AIR was collaborating with the Aarhus 2017 Foundation, officially being part of the “Aarhus 2017, European Capital of Culture”. The current focus of work of the organisation is interdisciplinary collaborations within visual art, creative/poetic writing, research and non-profit art organisations addressing global warming and ecological crisis.

www.sisselthastum.com www.theindependentair.com www.independentsustainability.com

photo Simon Beckmann

“Simon and Donna have converted Los Gázquez (Joya: AiR) into a place of beauty and solitude. It has a warmth that feels supportive without being intrusive and the pace is easy and unhurried. It is also gives you a fascinating insight into a life-long project of ecology and sustainability in one of the driest regions in Spain. 

Arriving at night after a long day travelling, I immediately felt at home surrounded by an inspiring personal collection of art, textiles and ceramics and an impressive display of local fossils that became my daily riverbed challenge!

Placed in the most extraordinary landscape of the Parque Natural - Sierra Maria, Los Gázquez is surrounded by a panorama of breath taking views. Walking or climbing, there are mountains, forests, fields and riverbeds where you are unlikely to see a soul. Coming from a small busy town on the Kent coast  that in itself felt like a luxury. 

This is a visual, and sensory landscape of textures, colours and aromas and if you are lucky you may get an occasional sighting of Andalucían wildlife. 

Walking became part of my daily routine, both thought provoking and meditative, feeding into my work, making subtle shifts and taking my creative practice in new and unexpected directions. 

In the evening, the main focus in the house was tasting the most wonderfully creative dishes prepared by Donna whilst sharing our stories and experiences. It’s not often in life one has the opportunity to share mealtimes with a disparate group of artists from around the world. It was a deeply enriching and inspiring experience”.

Karen Radford

https://www.theprintblock.com/section628947_688290.html

photo Simon Beckmann

“Joya: AiR is a beautiful space with vast landscapes. I felt that just breathing in the area was satisfactory.  

The studio with amazing view made me productive so I started my first still-life drawings with the objects what I found there. 

Everything that I met there was inspirational from stones to a goat. One of my drawings inspired by the surrounding environment was like a children's book illustration so I am planning to make a book about the goat 'Fou Fou.'

This was the best choice for my first residency. Simon and Donna was very considerate and all the artists were dedicated.

I appreciate that I could have the experience in Joya: AiR and look forward to see that how the experience appear in my art and life¨. 

Jihye Seo

www.artjseo.com

Education:
2014-2019 Goldsmiths, University of London, BA Fine Art

Solo Exhibition:
2019, Roastingrobo Gallery, Daegu, S.Korea

Group Exhibition:
2018, SEA-FEVER, The Auction Collective, London
2018, FLOCK 2018, GX Gallery, London
2017, Emerging Artists Breaking Out To The World, Goldsmiths ICCE x Art, London

photo Simon Beckmann

“The future can feel like a faraway place. Uncertain. Uncared for. Intangible. My current practice explores how we can build proximity with the future. Materialise the unknown. Give voice to its hidden narratives. Using design fiction and reverse archeology, my work aims to provoke a creative dialogue about sustainability. I do this by finding artefacts from the future in my present environments. While archeology recovers artefacts to build narratives about the past, “reverse archeology” both recovers and creates artefacts to speculate narratives about the future (Candy, 2013). During my time in Joya: AiR, I began to recover artefacts from the surrounding land of Cortijada Los Gázquez. Using photography and creative writing I began to contemplate: What would these artefacts share about the future of the land? The residency gave me a space to explore with ease, learn from nature and to question whats next for my practice”.

Nourhan Hegazy

https://nourhanhegazy.myportfolio.com/