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Joya: arte + ecología / AiR
Joya: arte + ecología / AiR is an "off-grid" interdisciplinary residency rooted in the crossroads of art, ecology and sustainable living practice. It is located in the heart of the Parque Natural Sierra María - Los Vélez, in the north of the province of Almería, Andalucía. Joya: AiR offers abundant time and space for residents to make, think, explore and learn from their surroundings.

Joya: AiR supports a range of disciplines including, but not limited to, visual art, writing, music, dance, curatorial and film. Founded by Simon and Donna Beckmann in 2009, the Joya: arte + ecología / AiR programme is grounded in the foundation that dynamic and sustainable creative activity is the backbone to regenerating the land that has been slowly abandoned over the last fifty years.

Since 2009, Joya: AiR has welcomed over 600 artists and creatives to realise their projects within one of the most unique and beautiful regions of the country. This is one of the sunniest regions of Europe receiving over 3000 hours of sunlight a year. Residents have access to studio space and 20 hectares of land. Joya’s working languages are English and Spanish.

Mission
Joya: arte + ecología is ‘an arts led field research centre’. The research is manifested through an arts residency (Joya: AiR), through collaborations with artists on projects generated, through transdisciplinary programmes with ecologists and environmental activists. Joya: arte + ecología also curates international artists within Spain.

Cultural practice at Joya: Los Gázquez is inseparable from cultural activities expressed through land and land use on this working farm. Joya: and Los Gázquez are in a continuous state of development evolving sustainable ways to convert dry land to sustainable and productive land via research, inquiry and development.

Joya: arte + ecología is the embodiment of a truly contemporary arts organisation working independently to engage with contemporary thought in relation to climate change and sustainability via education, research and activism.

Los Gázquez
Cortijada Los Gázquez (3281 ft.1000m alt.) a 50-acre (20 hectare) ‘off-grid’ rural farm in the heart of the Sierra María-Los Vélez Natural Park, Almería, Spain.

Simon and Donna Beckmann purchased Cortijada Los Gázquez in 2009. This is the full name of the property. Cortijo is the word for farm in castellano and a cortijada is a collection of small farm houses. Gázquez is the family name of those who once lived here.

In 2009 the Beckmanns started a long road in the pursuit of restoring Los Gázquez and the land that surrounds the farm. They created a challenge for themselves, a task that exhausted the skills they already possessed and left them in need of acquiring new knowledge. Conventional aspirations were thrown aside and once Joya: AiR, the residency, became a reality so did the reality that their continued existence here was more inexorably intertwined with the land, how we live and how we take responsibility.

Consequently, for the Beckmanns, Joya: arte + ecología / Los Gázquez has become a manifest research project, an exploration into contemporary art, sustainability, culture and history. It has become an attempt to ameliorate old ideas in the face of climate change, a search for new strategies, an exercise in self-reliance. It has become the embodiment of their creative instincts. Their art has occupied an effective and practical role in the philosophy of living sustainably. By positioning contemporary art alongside rural culture, they have come to understand this non-tangible asset we call the natural world, how it can serve us and how we can reciprocate.

Joya: arte + ecología / AiR at Los Gázquez has become a lifelong research project that aims to use science and the humanities as a strategy to rebuild a diminished rural community in an arid zone. By utilising the intertwined realities of research, innovation, science and culture, this plan seeks to create a socio-ecological system resistant to external global influences by providing security, a sense of identity, purpose and wellbeing.

Ecological Systems
A residency of one week at Los Gázquez, the home of Joya: arte + ecología, will off-set the carbon emissions generated by a flight within Europe. The more time you are in residence the less carbon you release into the atmosphere.

Compare Joya to a similar sized conventional building within the same climatic zone anywhere in the world and Joya is 98% carbon neutral. Los Gázquez also recycles everything.

Los Gázquez is located off-the-grid, or independent of the electric, water, and waste networks that connect most modern homes and buildings. The building itself is designed to focus on sustainable living and also uses both passive and active systems of energy production.

Electricity is generated by a combination of photo voltaic panels and a wind turbine. The energy is stored in batteries and used to illuminate the house.

Hot water is generated by solar panels for 70% of the year. The remaining 30% is supplemented by burning biomass which heats water for showers and underfloor heating. The biomass is collected from our land and by-product of sustainable forestry nearby.

Water is harvested from the roof and contained underground in a 60,000 litre deposit called an aljibe. It is then filtered and used for the house. Joya has two systems of waste water recycling.

A grey water system collects all the waste water from basins, showers, and the dishwasher (we only use eco-friendly detergents) and transports it to a giant reed bed where we grow Arundo donax. This giant river reed consumes the water and in return is used as structural material either in the garden or as shade around the house.

The black water system takes material directly from the toilets and carries this waste to a septic tank. However, the story doesn't finish there. Liquid material is carried away from here to two alternating aerobic vertical flow reed beds which are planted with Phragmites australis. This species of reed has colonised the planet growing in the most odorous regions and is excellent at consuming bacteria. The third part of this system collects the dead bacteria as a form of filtration. The final reed bed is anaerobic, a reed bed that utilises particular combinations of plants, soils, bacteria, substrates and hydraulic flow systems to optimise the physical, chemical and microbiological processes naturally present within the root zone of the plants to render this final zone 98% clean.

Joya: curate #3 / Double Self Split - Melissa Marks
In August 2016, two simultaneous installations by New York artist Melissa Marks were curated by Joya: arte + ecología. The two installations were created within the historic village of Vélez Blanco in the province of Almería, Andalucía, Spain.

The principal installation was made within the courtyard of the C16th Castillo de Los Fajardo. The work was part performance, part exhibition, and manifested as a 100 square meter mono­chrome floor painting/drawing created over a three-week period.

The second installation was made within the church of the C16th Iglesia de San Luis. Six­teen large composite drawings, monochrome and colour, exhibited in large, uniform white display boxes distributed across the nave and aisles of the church.

The courtyard of the castle, El Patio de Honor, now resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This project was conceived as a ‘re-envisioning’ of motifs from the original dec­oration in the original location of the courtyard. The intention was to create a reciprocal cultur­al gesture from contemporary New York to the heart of Renaissance Spain.

The Melissa Marks / Joya: arte + ecología collaboration was intended to re-contextualise and evaluate the history of an object, the Patio de Honor.

The cultural forces that initiated the design ideas used in the original courtyard came from ancient Rome and now reside in the most contemporary of metropolises, New York. This ‘passage’ of ideas associated with the courtyard has been manifested through design set out on paper, by the construction of the original edifice, by the physical transference of the object itself and by this reciprocal cultural gesture back to the original container, the Castillo de Los Fajardo in Spain.

In this instance, this event, Double Self Split has gathered before it all the ideas incumbent in this history, simultaneously breathing new life into the exhibit in the Metropolitan Museum and celebrating the history of the architecture that once lived in the castle, whilst attempting to define our place amongst nature.

On measure the collaboration / exhibition / installation was a huge success. Goals set out in reference to the exhibition in the Convento de San Luis were achieved with extremely positive results. The community attended the opening with alacrity and returned repeatedly over the duration of the exhibition. The performative nature of the work in the Patio de Honor drew large amounts of people, both local and coming from afar to see the work being created.