And here is a high speed sampler of presenting ‘cocido madrileño’…

‘Fresh Almonds from Spain’

Rebeen Majeed, one of the students from the Goldsmiths University MFA Fine Art course who took part in the group residency with Joya: arte + ecología, collected as many green almonds as he could during his stay at Cortijada Los Gázquez.  He gave them to the Kurdish families he knows in London, as that is the way they usually eat almonds in Iraq. You can find out more about his experience during the residency on his web site.

This was a seven hour walk starting at sunrise over the Sierra Larga. The almond blossom is now getting into full swing…

Someone is travelling east…

The view back to Los Gázquez and the fire break…

From near the top of Peña Cassenova on the Sierra Larga we can see La Sagra in Cazorla, Segura y Las Villas…

This is the view into La Hoya de Carrascal and another fire break. It took a couple of hours to scramble across the top of the Sierra Larga to get to our next destination, a forgotten cave in a distant barranco…

There is a short climb up a tricky screed to get to the cave on the other side of the barranco…

Looking back in the direction of our descent there is nothing but a wall of screed and pine trees.

But the reward is beautiful, a cave painting, a 6000 year old forgotten hieroglyph…

‘Fifteen London-based artists from the Goldsmiths MA program take up residence in the Andalusian landscape of Cortijada Los Gázquez. The Goldsmiths Fifteen, a group with mixed artistic practices ranging from painting to sculpting and performance, will use the rupture of dislocation from the academic institution as habitat (and the studio with all its physical and practical securities) in favour of the ‘en plein air’ to find out how one works when one is left without. Does the removal from London’s dense networked systems of access and the promise of Andalusian air prove fruitful or destructive to the trajectories of the artists’ ideas? How will The Goldsmith Fifteen work within and respond to this new (un)natural environment?’

The Goldsmith Fifteen

For more information please visit Joya: arte + ecología’s weblog.

On behalf and for the benefit of Joya: arte + ecología, Cortijada Los Gázquez is creating a ‘natural’ vineyard on their land in the Parque Natural Sierra María–Los Vélez. This is in the alpine desert of the mountains of Almería, Andalucía with poor soil and an average of 200mm of rainfall per year.

Our ‘natural’ wine will be produced from a small vineyard that will nurture the biodiversity of our landscape. It will embrace nature rather than control it. It will express our world view through it’s rejection of technology to boost productivity and focus on it’s purity rather than it’s perfection.

• Green area: ‘Área silvestre’ (wild)
• Purple area: ‘El viñedo’ (vineyard)
• Red area: ‘Área de restauración’ (ready for re-planting with native species)

To augment our ‘natural’ wine we are inviting artists to create small edition artworks to attach to the bottles we produce. These will be ‘one off’ editions of around 500 works. The artwork will represent the ethos of the product and of Joya: arte + ecología but say nothing directly of the contents of the bottle. Textural information on the product will be on a small label at the neck of the bottle.

Profit from the ‘natural’ wine will be given to the non-profit, Joya: arte + ecología for the benefit of the activities of the organisation.

To fund the project we will be looking for private investment to kickstart the vineyard. The parcel of land has been selected and cleared. Currently we are looking for technical advice and vines…

For more information contact Simon at info@losgazquez.com and write Viñedo de Artistas in the subject line.

For more information follow this link… http://www.joyaarteyecologia-blog.org/category/vinedo-de-artistas/

Joya: arte + ecología needed room for expansion so we have built a new ‘weblog’ to accommodate our increasing activities. We will continue to post ‘Joya’ projects here but from now on this blog will revert back slightly to it’s original intention, to celebrate ‘sustainable’ life in the beautiful mountains of Almería and to tell you about our creative courses.

http://www.joyaarteyecologia-blog.org/

Joya: arte + ecología necesitaba espacio para expandirse, de modo que hemos creado un nuevo “weblog” para alojar toda la información sobre nuestras actividades. Continuaremos informando sobre los proyectos de Joya aquí pero de ahora en adelante este blog volverá un poco a lo que era su intención original, celebrar la vida “sostenible” en las bellas montañas de Almería e informaros sobre nuestros cursos creativos.

Joya: arte + ecología is looking for a ‘technical coordinator’ to be a permanent part of their collective.

Duties will include:

Web development

Programming

Electrical engineering

Co-Curating electronic arts projects

Promotion

Furthermore the technical coordinator will be invited to contribute to all other aspects of our collective.

Joya: arte + ecología is an arts collective based at Cortijada Los Gázquez in the heart of the Parque Natural Sierra María – Los Vélez in the north of the Provincia de Almería, Andalucía. The guiding principle behind the activities of the organisation is to facilitate, through production and collaboration, art and artists whose work manifests a discourse with the environment and sustainability… read more here

‘Luce Choules has spoken inspiringly about Joya: arte + ecología and the landscape of the Parque Natural Sierra María-Los Vélez – I would love to share in the special atmosphere of creative living you have made there. Luce’s small rocks sitting on her windowsill are a constant reminder of the landscape and I long to see those illuminated by the light of that place. With Joya in mind I have been developing some new ideas to test my practice in the context of an expansive landscape – an opportunity to explore colour and aerial perspective. Adding this new element to my established concerns of sequence and duration is an exciting prospect’.

Please follow this link to read Elizabeth Jackson’s proposal.

“Luce Choules me ha hablado de manera inspiradora sobre Joya: arte + ecología y el paisaje del Parque Natural de Sierra María-Los Vélez. Me gustaría participar de esa atmósfera especial de vida creativa que habéis creado allí. Las pequeñas piedras de Luce posadas en su alféizar son un recordatorio constante del paisaje y anhelo verlas iluminadas por la luz de ese lugar. Con Joya en mente he estado desarrollando algunas ideas nuevas para poner a prueba mi trabajo artístico en el contexto de un paisaje extenso, una oportunidad para explorar el color y la perspectiva aérea. Añadir este nuevo elemento a mis inquietudes sobre la secuencia y la duración es una perspectiva emocionante”.

Sigue este enlace para obtener más información sobre el proyecto de Elizabeth Jackson para Joya: arte + ecología.

David Mabb has been working with the designs of 19th century designer and socialist William Morris for over ten years. William Morris thought that interior design had a fundamental role to play in the transformation of everyday life. This essentially political motivation – a commitment to the radical potential of design – is behind much of his work as a designer and craftsman and the setting up of Morris & Co. Morris’ designs constituted a radical break with the orthodoxy of neo-Gothic of his time. They are highly schematized representations of nature, where it is always summer and never winter; the plants are always in leaf, often flowering, with their fruits available in abundance, ripe for picking, and with no human labour in sight. This is a Utopian vision, an image of Cokaygne. Mabb’s paintings, photographs, textiles and videos all, in different ways, work with and against Morris’ utopian designs by contrasting them with other forms of modernist production. Mabb never simply paints or covers over the Morris pattern with another image: elements of the Morris pattern always poke or burst through. This combination produces an unstable picture space that is never fixed, where a Morris pattern and the other image are never able to fully merge or separate.

David Mabb will view his residency through his engagement with the work of William Morris. Morris never went to Spain, however he was well aware of Islamic design and his Peacock and Dragon woven textile is heavily dependent on examples of Spanish Islamic weaving. Mabb might imagine what Morris would have made of the Alhambra or the desert foliage, or might deliberate on Morris as a proto-green in the context of Cortijada Los Gázquez, or by reading Morris’ Icelandic journals it might be possible to create a counter-journal, a distorted mirror to the Icelandic Journals. Mabb might deliberate on all these things, or none of them.

To find out more about David Mabb’s Joya: arte + ecología residency, please follow this link.