Alain Ayers object><project
2011 Joya Residency, Cortijada Los Gázquez - Spain
Joya can appear as a dislocation from the ‘outside world’ that creates
choreographed chaos. A volcano spews ash, a major earthquake takes its toll, people get trapped underground and nature's discontinuities become enfolded as disaster, catastrophe or trauma. For a moment or eternity is everything, everywhere and everyone connected?
Joya - Place With No Name
temporary site work
Joya - Place With No Name
360º camera pan
A flat ledge at the southern boundary with the hill tops as horizon. Triangular in shape, it has a deep water course on one side, trees and shrubs on rising ground on another and an open aspect to the north, looking back towards the house.
It captures the sun and channels the wind and the clay ground can be sticky-wet or bone dry. Markers, actions and observations seed further ideas towards an 'ecology of mind.' (ref. Gregory Bateson, Steps To An Ecology of Mind)
This 360º forms a topological mapping and locates the camera and operator as a producer in a cultural / ecological panorama. An aspect of the work is experienced through the physicality of walking, climbing, carrying the equipment and selecting locations for the panoramas and is intended to both record and reconstruct an environment. The possibility of the viewer seeing the producer as present and visible becomes a significant moment. When seen to be ‘at work’ / 'in the work' the panoramic insight is disrupted.
As one of the basic film shots and particularly celebrated in the vistas of landscape or spanning transitional time it’s sweep is rarely ever interrupted in the near foreground, and not by the person operating the camera, who 'must' remain invisible.
Joya - Sleeping and Dreaming, 1-4
Nearness:
Ecomimesis hangs in the air. Higher vantage points can cast a pictorial idea about nature, with some ease, into an epic nearness but the distance of environmental inflection is never far off. (ref. Ecology Without Nature, Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics,Timothy Morton)
Distance:
The not so far away white-washed enclaves resonate as does the vast tented shoreline set into high yield food production and the ecological problematics of an EU - CAP (Common Agricultural Policy). Then there is Intercultural Dialogue which could take any form, if dreaming. ‘To be honest, before he came the club was pretty well dead. Like Estrella del Mar, in many ways we were turning into another dozy pueblo. Bobby threw himself into everything: fencing, drama, squash. He opened the disco downstairs, and he and Frank set up the Admiral Drake regatta. Forty years ago he’d have been running the Festival of Britain.’ (ref. p. 46 Cocaine Nights, JG Ballard)
Joya - Nomadic
No flights. Nine days from the south to the north of Europe via
Alicante, Barcelona, Paris, Cologne, Copenhagen, Gothenburg.
2012 Recording: 1
First screened at the Gothenburg International Film Festival. A sequences of objects are moved through the interior of self storage units. A process of performative actions enact a dialogue with the voice and space.
2010 Going Underground
Image-text installation, written as a filmic ‘treatment’ for - slashseconds
