JOYA; ARTIST IN RESIDENCE

SEPTEMBER 2024

Set in the highlands of Almería, within the Comarca de Los Vélez, Joya: AiR inhabits a landscape shaped by wind, water, and time — a place where the mountains hold forests, and the valleys crack open into drylands. This is a transitional terrain: part wildland, part badlands, rich with contrasts and resilience.

Here, ecological boundaries are visible and felt — in the arid breath of the soil, the patterns of abandonment and regrowth, the erosional signatures etched into the land. Yet this is not a desert. It is a semi-arid ecotone where biodiversity and geological memory intersect, offering a raw and urgent context for creative exploration.

Artists-in-residence engage not just with landscape, but with process: of restoration, listening, and imagining alternatives to extraction and decline. Los Vélez is a collaborator, archive, and provocation.

During the course of this residency I was able to create an archive of plant-based film developers from flora within the local ecologies of Almería. I was thinking a lot about time and whether I wanted to mark its passage or just acknowledge it. I was wondering whether time needed to be perceived or if it just enjoyed the act of doing and undoing without the recognition. Time has a lot of conversations in the dark. You can still feel time when you close your eyes.

During the end of my stay I was fortunate enough to share DIY workshops with participating artists.

These images were developed on Expired Agfa film and with foraged rosemary, 2024.