Memoirs from the desert

The shy beginnings

Listening to: Kojaque - Heaven Shouldn't Have You and the entire Phantom of the Afters album

Greetings everyone,

I hope you are enjoying the very first day of July. I am exceptionally delayed in this sharing and have wanted to write this entry for months but life interfered, as well as the creeping procrastination that comes with not wanting to revisit days of a simpler time before life got so interfering. Existing is so expensive isn’t it? It costs so much of your precious time.

I will not bore you further with this drab talk of existence. Instead, I can bore you with some rememberings of January at Montemero Artist Residency in Almeria. I don’t know about you, but I am not comfortable entering a stranger’s space in which I will be staying for six weeks. Sitting down for dinner with new people is nerve-wracking. I spend so long thinking of something that relates to the conversation and then how to say it that I miss my chance completely, I don’t know where to stand and for how long to stand there. I guess it is, how you say, being a shy person. So the social thing at the beginning was tough, I did a lot of hiding and also forcing myself to be present when actually it would’ve been more appropriate to hide. This is in no means any reflection of my hosts Emily and Pino, who were incredibly warm and welcoming, and seemed to genuinely want me to treat the place as home. And our friendship did flourish, as I grew more comfortable and found my place in the family (middle child).

Luckily I had the best room in the house, or rather, outside of the house. A little stone bed chamber at the fringes of the finca on a small outcrop above one of the caves, with a desert view straight out of a Western. The mountain lit up orange every morning, and I could trace the sun’s progression through the sky from my bed.

This finca/homestead(?) was built by German artist Wolfgang Simon some decades ago. He was primarily a printmaker, and so the studio is full of great iron presses that must have required immense effort to get from Berlin to Almería. Arriving in January, I was the only artist in residence at Montemero so I had the whole studio to myself. The luxury! Multiple surfaces to pile scraps, paints, water vessels and half-baked ideas. The studio is again separate from the main house, so I could stay as late as I wanted, working on into the dark evenings when I would often be joined by a gecko chilling out on the wall.

The folks at Montemero do some incredible conservation work, tackling a lot of local environmental concerns, including issues with the sea which is 15 minutes walk from the finca. Both of them are free divers, and they offered to take me out but I do have a love/fear of the open water that I wasn’t yet ready to conquer. I did begin training my lungs (basically Wim Hoff) to increase their capacity but that in turn gave me chills, and IDK apparently a steady breath is really important when free diving. Anyway, they do all sorts of wonderful innovative work in the area, which you can read up on here. They have a plastic lab onsite, where they turn collected agricultural waste and plastic from the sea into practical products that can be reused by farmers, as well as everyday objects. They aim to set up projects hiring local migrants and paying them decent wages, as a lot of people come up through Morocco and North Africa to work, where their labour gets exploited by the local farms (which produce the majority of the fruits and vegetables in our supermarkets).

This emphasis on regeneration and cyclical consumption naturally made its way into the studio, where I started gathering things from the bins: paper, cardboard, packaging. A tea bag station was set up next to the sink where we were swiftly confronted with the tea consumption levels onsite. A daily meditation was established, where I collected the tea bags from the kitchen, opened them up and sprinkled all the contents on the garden, then smoothing them out on a table in the sun to dry. I went to the residency to paint, but the surroundings and company engaged a desire for more tangible construction in the first few weeks.

In the studio Kojaque’s latest album somehow sealed itself to my ears. This playlist also had many repeated plays, and in the evenings I would concoct a strange cauldron of eerie magic with OXN’s album and this song which did many things to my brain as I tried to understand what the fuck I was there to create.

BTW Phantom of the Afters is absolutely incredible start to finish, Kojaque is so creative with weaving stories throughout the album and the production is gorgeous, layering voice notes and samples which pull you into the worlds he creates. The finisher is heartbreaking and heart-restoring all in one. I always relate to a messy tale and that album is full of chaos and the growth that comes from it. More on OXN’s album at a later stage. Thank you for tuning into my music blog.

I felt I haven’t really said anything, yet I have also said too many things so perhaps I will leave it here. I want to share all these diaries soon as otherwise they will get buried under a pile of other junk in my mind and never see the light of day. My mind badly needs a good spring clean and hopefully the ejection of this little bit of clutter will help, so thank you for reading my clutter.

Lots of love, take care of your precious self <3