Print Issue 2: All The Things We Cannot See
Welcome to the second print issue of L’OFFICIEL IBIZA, in which we explore themes of identity and evolution on an island which - for thousands of years - has been the mother of all reinvention. As Ibiza once more recasts itself in a new light, editor at large Maya Boyd uncovers a shapeshifting Mediterranean bolthole in constant flux.
‘Can you find another star to dream on?
The summer's coming to an end
Say goodbye to all your wandering friends
And lovers, casual confidants
Who shared your dreams
When you were sixteen.’
We sat on a sandstone outcrop as the sea lapped at our toes. All around us, mystical carvings were etched into the peach-hued cliffs and below, an angular, irregular stone pool as clear and bright as a peppermint. Our newfound tribe perched like seagulls among the rocks: lean, long-haired, conker-brown boys in low-slung denim cut-offs, who listened to the Happy Mondays and wore their Converse All Stars with the backs trodden down; topless girls in pareos from Goa who braided each other’s hair and drank sangria straight from the carton. We roamed Ibiza as a half-wild pack, slept top-to-toe in too few beds, fell in love, fell out of love, kissed, danced, argued and made up. Everything we did was tinged with urgency, as if we knew these days couldn’t last.
That hazy afternoon the boys dived from the rocks, racing each other far from shore and climbing back out, breathless, laughing, as slippery and brown as eels. We sat side by side, my best friend Helen and I, threadbare espadrilles just touching at the sides. Grassy tendrils of marijuana smoke licked up from the rocks below as the sinking sun turned everything the colour of yesterday. We felt like the kings of creation. As we left Atlantis for the long hike home, we paused for a photo on top of the mythical pirate tower, the dark mass of Es Vedra silhouetted against the sky behind us. A freeze-frame of a day, an hour, a moment in which - 1500 miles from my English home - my Ibiza identity (or so it felt) was forged. I had never felt so sure of who I was and where I belonged.
Identity is a mercurial concept, bridging as it does both how we see ourselves and how others perceive us. There are times when the evolution of my own identity on the island – hippie beach kid to wide-eyed raver to glossy nightlife girl to wife, author and ultimately mother of three hippie beach kids – feels to have come full circle. The complex allure of Ibiza itself is trickier to unravel, namely because it means so many things to so many people. It is at once a musical mecca, a natural paradise, a cultural destination, a trashy resort, an upscale yachting magnet and a melting pot of mythology and folklore. Of course, Ibiza’s reputation as the home of reinvention is nothing new: the identity of the island has shifted like the Saharan sands for thousands of years, culture upon culture, age upon age, belief upon belief. It was once said that Ibiza is to the historian what the Galapagos are to the naturalist: scratch the surface and you’ll find a Phoenician trading port, a federated city of Rome, an outlying outpost of the Catalan Kingdom of Aragon and an annex of the Islamic caliphate of Cordoba, among other things. In Dalt Vila, the Catholic cathedral – Santa Maria de las Nieves – has lived past lives as both a Punic shrine and a Muslim Mosque. Even Tanit, Ibiza’s Great Mother Goddess, has many faces: an earlier version of her can be found in the Babylonian nature goddess, Ishtar; while the Romans reinvented her as Juno, the goddess of marriage and the Triple Moon.
In the light of Ibiza’s ever-changing mystique, it is unsurprising that seekers have been washing up here for generations, ready to lose, find and define themselves. Attracted by the myth of the Mediterranean, the pull of the archaic south, the light, the music and the freedom, they come in droves in search of adventure, answers and absolution. It is almost a century since those early trailblazers made landfall. Spearheaded by the German architect Erwin Broner (whose identity had already changed once – he was born Erwin Heilbronner in Munich in 1898 to a family of Jewish bankers) they found refuge in this primitive backwater. Within a short time, a tight community of intellectuals and artists developed, including philosopher Walter Benjamin, philologist Walther Spelbrink, writer Albert Camus and the photographer Man Ray. What they found in Ibiza was a place where personal transformation was welcome and the evolution of identity a necessary step in the creative process. Given the space, the light and the freedom, their wings unfurled. They metamorphosed like moths from cocoons despite, according to Benjamin, being deprived of almost everything their former lives had offered - ‘electric light and butter, liquor and running water, flirting and reading the paper’. Later, post-war arrivals, including members of Ibiza’s fabled modernist art collective, Ibiza Grupo ’59, spoke of reinvention and of being reborn. ‘It was a very strong emotional impulse,’ the German artist Katja Meirowsky recalled. ‘It seemed unreal: the blue sky, the colour of the sea, and the citadel of Dalt Vila. Things that were diametrically opposed to the threatening world in which I had lived.’
Of course, reinvention can go either way. In the early 1960s, the Irish author Damien Enright arrived on the island as a happily married, softly spoken, preparatory school teacher and re-cast himself – in four short years – as a wife-less hashish smuggler and Spain’s most wanted man. Ibiza, it seems, had other plans for him. ‘We’d been to Mallorca, where everyone was playing bridge and wearing pressed shorts.’ Enright recalled. ‘We were told there were foreigners in Ibiza but we were amazed to see what kind: the craziest, most oddball, one-off types I’d ever laid eyes on. They were all kinds of bohemian loony school; they drank like crazy, argued like crazy and generally led a music and jazz kind of life.’
During the 1960s and 1970s, when Ibiza was in the throes of a countercultural revolution and referred to in bohemian international circles as ‘the hippie island’, identity was something conferred by the community for practical reasons. Names were chosen to be useful - Danish George or George the Car, Little Pam or Big Pam, Far Out Phyllis, Chicago Joe and The Quiet One. Nobody knew – or in fact, cared - about each other’s pre-island lives, leaving folk free to present themselves as they felt. My own [English] father went by the name of Gene, remembering that, ‘it felt cool, American somehow. Like someone from the Wild West.’ His actual name is David. Interestingly, this mirrors rural Ibiza’s traditional naming convention – a quick glance at the mailboxes in San Carlos will reveal Pep d’es Horts (Joe with the Vegetable Garden), Miquel de sa Font (Michael from the Well) and the somewhat less charming Vicent Porc (Vincent the Pig).
Contemporary Ibiza is, in many ways, in the throes of a seismic identify shift once more. Having made peace with the mantle of ‘rave mecca’ (it’s just the Balearic beat child gone rogue and wild), glossed over the north/south divide (they’re both great) and undergone yet another spiritual revolution, the island is now recasting itself as an earthy, enlightened sophisticate. There is a return to heritage craft, to acoustic music, to the land and to each other. To theatre and filmmaking and the harvest. There is a reimagining of our relationships with our community and a steady return to the meritocracy ideals that defined the last century. The culture of the VIP shows signs of finally wearing thin, and once more you are as likely to be seated next to a backpacker as a billionaire at a dinner party. In the north, the island’s younger generation identify far more with the simple values of their freewheeling 1970s parents than with those who fly in on private jets. In the south, a public outcry recently prevented the closure of Talamanca’s lo-fi, plastic-chaired Bar Flotante, one of the last bastions of simplicity close to glossy Marina Botafoch. I for one have always known where to find my own Ibiza. It’s on the whitewashed terrace of Santa Agnes’s Can Cosmi as the sun sinks below the hills. It’s in the firelit back room of Bar Anita playing Uno on a cold winter’s night. It is talking late into the dark beneath the orange trees at Camí de Balàfia and climbing the smooth stone ramp to Dalt Vila and watching my children dive from the rocks at Seagull Cove, a clutch of northern fisherman’s huts so far-flung that even we don’t know its real name.
For all its changing faces, arguably Ibiza’s most intangible feature has always been its ability to mould, to shape and to encourage transformation in those who make the journey here. In a world where identity has become a tick box, a calling card, a stamp of allegiance to one side or another, Ibiza tells you to come as you are and see what she can make of you. Those who take the leap of faith may find themselves smoothed out like a pebble in a rock pool or shattered into a thousand pieces. Either way, it is not for the faint hearted. But as we change, so Ibiza changes too, and therein exists the endless, mirroring dance that is this collective Mediterranean dream.
‘When all your illusions did lie in the palm of your hand
And your limits were only the sky and the rolling sand
And of every summer to come
This summer would be the one
You’d remember forever
In your dreams’James & the Gang, Joan Baez, 1987
