We arrived at JOYA artist residency on a Friday via bus from Granada, a couple of hours into the alpine sierras of the Andalusian desert landscape. Simon, the residency director, picked us up from the center of town in Velez-Rubio and drove us 13 kms further into the natural park at Maria Los Velez in his trusty white landrover. Our studio, a beautiful space with an easterly facing large panoramic window, would be our hub for our explorative walks in these 89 square miles of dry wilderness.
Blooming from our center, we trekked forth in the Sierra Maria — LosVelez –looping from a central location, immersing in the rosemary-fragrant and almond blossom spotted landscape, pivoting, scaling, descending and returning back to center.
Our dialogue between body and landscape becoming a way to travel in time as well as space, to understand the landscape short of painting it. This informs how we relate to the natural world in an artistic context—our bodies are the instrument, our path the music, our experience the dialogue. Making art about the landscape is one way of listening to the world, walking the landscape is another.
We began the residency at JOYA with a conversation, confronting triumphant yet troubled interpretations of nature and our practice’s relationship to it, aiming to answer tough questions about the perceptions of the environment; ascribed meanings and shortcomings in reaching diverse perspectives. It was a direction that diverted from our individual practices. Most of our research while at Sierra Maria Los Velez involved peripatetic modes of investigating places and employing logistics of outdoor navigation that respond to the landscape’s history, its people and the ecological imprints on the land.
The terraces scraped into the mountain surface, the long worn paths scarred into the terrain, old farms that form a wonderous cardiovascular system for water, Nature’s defiance in reclamation, all oriented us to our own geographic discoveries of the region. Witnessing the tremendous challenges the landscape surrounding our central location faces– our work points us to a direction of land conservation and to challenge our outdoor ethics to land long employed in support of human activity.
We quickly noticed the beautiful presence of the Aleppo Pine covering the conifer forests all around us, an indigenous tree that grows in certain areas of the Mediterranean including the south of Spain. Their bark dark reddish brown, curving at their trunks boasting long light green needles and growing to resemble giant bonsai.
