Ephemeral Stream

EPHEMERAL STREAM
Joya: arte + ecología / AiR Artist residency 
22.05–05.06.2025 Vélez-Rubio / Spain

Barbara Kubska / Anka Sielska / Katarzyna Zolich

During the residency, we worked collectively on the project Ephemeral Stream. The collective was built on the idea of organic collaboration. A shared community of research and visual interests allowed us to create at the intersection of the personal and the collective. We worked horizontally, constantly checking whether the actions we were taking felt alive – in us and in our art. At the same time, we gave ourselves space to explore methods in line with our individual experiences and with ourselves. Without strictly assigned roles, but with assumptions that shifted throughout the course of the project.

Central to our work was space understood as a body – a chosen and bounded segment of reality that has a physical dimension, that can be pointed to on a map; its qualities and character: fauna and flora, soil, terrain. The fundamental premise of our project was to be in relation with the land, the space, and a specific ecosystem – and to attempt to blur the boundary between human and non-human ways of experiencing reality. It was also an attempt to move beyond certain dualisms: cause and effect, independence and scarcity, power and chaos. The project is an exploration of the possibility of returning to the complexity of the human relationship with place, space, and land – an attempt to speak about interdependencies (including from the perspective of the soil itself) of an entire system in relative terms, that is, in relation to the observer, who always acts within a specific context.

Our goal was to create a kind of atlas of actions with and for the land – in the form of a book/artbook that brought together our experiences and conclusions as a whole.