LA RUINA
LA RUINA
MEDITATION ROOM / IBIZA
Architecture and Interior Design Diego and Alexeja Art & Design Studio
He breathed deeply and consciously slowing the rhythm of his intakes until nine times per minute. The air was feeling slowly his lungs and the tiredness of the day started to vanish with each exhalation. It has been a long day since he left San Lorenzo with his flock as he did daily in the search of better pastures for his sheep.
He had made a fire outside to warm himself and fed on a loaf of bread enhanced with wild fennel that was baked the morning earlier in his domed clay oven (waiting, as always, till the round ceiling turned white as his grand father has taught him). The bottle of hierbas was always in his sack and after a few seeps he laid inside the room protected by the lime stone walls which kept the warmth of the last rays of sunset.
When he walked up in the middle of the night, he went out and urinated to the right of the door wetting the dry mud ground. There, a nopal cactus grew from a seed blown in the wind after its yellow flower was fecundated by the laborious bees of Ibiza.
Somewhere on the hills near Jesús the small construction rise at the foot of some bancales where once upon a time grew some Xeixa wheat. Before that it was a wild area with green patches where the ibicenco Shepherds used to pilgrimage in their long pasture rounds of the island. A couple of hundred years ago, to extend their passages, a few families joined efforts to build together a small shed where to spend the night during the long winters. Some times alone or often reunited and playing together the traditional “piccolo” flute.
That was a different time on the island. There were no discos, not ayahuasca ceremonies, not even salineras. The podencos runned along the herds and life was tough but certainly slower. With time, and what is called progress, this shed was abandoned. The ceiling was made of a first layer of Sabina wood, one other layer of dried Posidonia seaweed in the middle, and a stucco made of lime with red earth and grass on the top.
The roof has fallen in a corner as part of the walls collapsed underneath. Pine trees have grown over the back wall and the natural stone floor in the interior got covered with debris. That nopal cactus outside kept growing and flowering year by year.
This is the essence that we wanted to capture when we were offered to re-construct this Ruin (ruina) into a meditation and ceremonial space. We meditated on this idea of shepherds spending their nights there. That moment when the day is over and one goes inward. When in absolute command of the elements within helps command elements of a cosmos beyond, and thus, the cosmic presence.
A tantric understanding of the total acceptance and affirmation of life.
The space was conceived for that, to offer a womb where to retreat. A place where the bondage of duality may be escaped through realizing the union of opposites within the human body and mind.
Photographs by Aurelia Marine
