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. I Thought about the art of forgetting, and Tehching hsieh saying ‘A little bit of failure is good for the system’.

It’s funny that you can still feel time even when you can’t always recall it.

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.