The above image was taken somewhere in rural Ibiza in the early 1970’s. The scene was captured by Josep Soler, the Catalan photographer who made a name for himself by recording, on film, the surge of hippies that was rapidly descending onto the island at that time, colliding with an astonishingly well-preserved ancient peasant culture that was tightly woven into the interior landscapes of Ibiza. Soler has written that ‘When I saw (the hippies) for the first time it was a tremendous shock, because although I came from Barcelona, I had never seen anything like this before - people with long, flowing manes of hair and full beards, wearing unconventional clothes. Above all, I was struck by their lifestyle, the way that they shared everything they had between each other, and how they turned their backs on the materialism that has since come to dominate our lives.’
Of all of Soler’s images, the above is the one that has gone on to attain a quite mythical status. It appears in print in books and glossy magazines, and runs rife across Pinterest, tagged with the crucial keywords ‘Ibiza’, ‘bohemian’, ‘lifestyle’ and ‘hippy’, often linked to real estate agencies or corporate brands relating to fashion, hedonism or luxury travel. Soler’s image has also been posted in a jewel of a Facebook group called ‘Fotos Eivissa Antigua’, where predominantly Ibizan people share historical photographs from their own personal collections, relating to the island’s culture, traditions and landscapes. Here, the monochrome shot is accompanied by many wistful comments, mainly written in Ibicenco (Ibiza’s local Catalan dialect), which include: ‘Que bonica, quantes coses s'han perdut!!!!’ (‘how lovely, those times are lost forever!’) and ‘Payes i Hippies molt bone foto i harmonie ESPECTACULAR’ (‘Peasants and hippies, a wonderful photo celebrating a union that was spectacular’). In other words, it’s an image illustrating the meeting point of two completely different cultures (in a near-Freudian slip I almost wrote colours, I’ll return to that shortly) - the rooted island natives, and us, the roaming, seeking foreigners - and it seems that both cultures now cling adoringly to this distilled, frozen picture because of the relationship, the state of interconnectedness represented by it - and the value and meaning that this brief exchange offered to both parties.
Me, I struggle to articulate the full power of this image - what it represents within the utter, sheer madness that is the story of Ibiza’s modern history, as well as what it means in my own personal and creative life, as the archetypal pelut (the Ibicenco expression for a hippie, meaning ‘hairy’ or ‘long-haired one’) - an artistically-inclined foreigner trying to pour their work into this very encounter, this meeting with Ibiza’s many-layers-deep peasant culture, which seems to me as exotic and mysterious as the Hindu Kush, or the inner valley floor of Transylvania, or the remote depths of Mali. Josep Soler’s image captures two tides of seismic raw energy, emanating from opposite directions, from distant worlds, and colliding with each other on a dirt track somewhere in a rural backwater of the island. The fair-haired lightness of the flower children who had been ‘everywhere’, who came from ‘out there’ and who had now chosen to step onto these shores and ‘be here’ of their own free will, crossing paths with the lead-heavy blackness of tight, rooted-in-place ancestry, bound by stitches, repeated steps, linens, crop cycles, dowry, death, dance, well-waters and dense cut bread.
Light meets darkness, black meets white. The encounter that is frozen in Soler’s photo is explosive - it is pure, leaping, heart-stopping chemistry. All the energy of two worlds, colliding for the very first time, is suspended in this black and white picture, and half a century later locals, journalists, cultural critics, fashion designers, fading rock stars and retired DJ’s alike return to it again and again, in an attempt to renew the vows of a marriage which was to eventually become estranged, wrought with pain, a bit toxic. In many cases those nostalgic glances are peoples’ attempts to convince themselves that nothing has changed since that golden meeting - in most cases I think the repeated, lingering glances are simply attempts to understand what went wrong.
But back then, right at the very beginning, there was magic there. It’s in the photograph for all to see.
One way of analysing what happened to upset the very mystical balance of opposite polarities that was in place at the time Soler’s photograph was taken - the era regarded almost unanimously by locals and foreigners alike as Ibiza’s ‘golden age’ - is to look to the waters. Because, you know me… I can’t get enough of a handy water metaphor. Very simply, in the earlier days these barefoot visitors drew their water from the wells, alongside the local peasants. Since then, Ibiza’s inland freshwater supply, which forms the focal point of the island’s folklore, mythological universe and ancient spiritual creed has, in the words of Ibizan journalist Joan Lluís Ferrer, been ‘trafficked’ to supply the tourist industry piled up on the outer edges of the island, as well as the countless rural villas whose non-native plants and grass lawns are kept lusciously green all year round, despite the properties only being inhabited for a couple of months a year. Something that was first shared, went on to be plundered. As the wellwaters receded, the golden cord that bound two opposite worlds together to such initially electrifying and explosive effect became worn, and eventually, you might say, severed completely. And perhaps all that I am striving for in all that I do is a clumsy attempt to repair that cord.
Soler’s mythical photograph shows our flock of golden-haired, fresh-faced draft-dodgers encountering a set of three peasant women on a dirt track. So I thought I might recall three Ibizan peasant women that I have crossed paths with, and been touched by in some way, since I first ‘landed’ on these shores as a young adult.
I will start my chronology in the present day, and work my way backwards. The first of my rural guardians dressed in black I will refer to as the woman of Atzaró. She is the elderly custodian of the stretch of wild, wild woods which I have been returning to regularly over the past two years, to follow the aromatic herb-filled track that leads to a stone chamber which, according to some, aligns with the rays of the midwinter sun. She is the grandmother of the well, who featured in the field recording that I shared here on Substack a few weeks ago, marking the Winter Solstice. We have never conversed - I have timidly called out to greet her but she never replies. She inhabits her own psychic realm, perpetually surrounded by the lumpy-walled, snow white house that her ancestors no doubt built, and spending prolongued periods out in the courtyard, staring at her chickens, slowly pruning a tree. The bubble she inhabits is a bubble that can never, ever be burst. Every time I enter her path into the woods, my first steps are always cautious, as though placing my weight onto that bubble. When I leave, there’s a moment when it no longer feels like I’m treading over her psychic space, when springy, mossy earth turns to hard asphalt. That’s when I draw ‘ g o o d b y e ’ on a chalkboard in my mind, and hold it up to her as I walk across the road.
The second of my trio I shall call the woman of Benimussa. I encountered her almost seven years ago, when I was stopped in my tracks one day at the sight of an old Renault 4 van, littering the car-strewn yard of her mechanic son. ‘I always dreamt of owning one of those’, I said to the person I was with. ‘He’s had it for sale for years’, they repied. As a slightly flustered but friendly foreigner I became entangled with Toni and his octogenarian mother, as we entered the rigmarole of transferring the paperwork for his van to my name - an English girl with no fixed address. I had absolutely no idea what was going on, but I kept smiling. As he ran off a list of forms that I needed to go and collect from the police station, his mother sat beside the door on a wooden chair, her hands moving rhythmically over a bucket pressed against her knees. She wore the kind of checked, pastel tunic that my german grandmother always wore when I was a child, as she busied about making lentil soup and apfelpfannkuchen. I gazed at her face and I was startled. Her eyes were small, squinting at me in the sunlight, but they danced with such vibrancy and raw love, against the ruddy and bloodshot skin of her face, that I was shocked. Her chin was coated in a soft down of long whiskers. I looked at what she was doing - breaking carob pods into pieces and letting them drop to the bottom of the metal bucket with a thwack - her hands were knobbled, tree-like, astonishing.
One lunchtime I returned nervously, as arranged, and entered the dark, yawning interior of the farmhouse. The table was set for Toni and his mother’s lunch - primer plato, a watery cabbage stew. A saint shimmering in a frame on the peeling wall, old food stains on the plastic tablecloth. A basket of eggs. Toni coaxed his mother to sign my form, helping her to move the biro on the page - she evidently, just like me, had absolutely no clue what was going on.
It took me almost two years to realise that I had been officially registered as living at their address, in order to legally transfer Toni’s car to my name. Lord knows how many of my parking tickets they must have received.
The third and final dark-clad dame with whom I brushed so briefly, but never forgot, is the woman of Benirràs. She takes me back to my 20yr old self, hitch-hiking around the north with my best friend Clare, sleeping beneath pine trees, re-arranging paradigms. This extremely fleeting encounter took place one day as I was on my way down to the beach - Ibiza’s deep, rural interior was unchartered territory back then. But a glimpse of something at the edge of a field, an experience which can’t have lasted more than a few seconds, would inspire a voyage of enquiry stretching far into the years that followed.
During the pandemic I crafted my encounter with this woman of Benirràs into a poem that appeared as an editorial for the Gang of Witches eco-feminism podcast, to which I was regularly contributing at the time. I leave the piece with you below, or you can listen to an audio version of it around 32 minutes into Episode Two: The Rise of the Rural Women, which I also edited, co-recorded, translated and provided a voice-over for. This episode is very special to me, and features a moving interview with a new wave of young Ibizan female farmers who are returning to cultivate the land that was abandoned by their parents and grandparents several decades ago, at the onset of tourism.
The Last Payesa Woman
I saw you,
almost twenty years ago,
beside the crossroads to Benirràs.
There was a movement in the field which somehow caught my eye,
and when I saw your dark shape, my heart stopped,
I don't know why.
You were moving in a different rhythm -
Some would say you were not moving at all.
Moving in accordance to
other instincts,
another, different frame of time, and space.
A rhythm that I think perhaps the fig tree knows,
and that dry-stoned wall beside it.
Amazing, that I was driving briefly by,
and yet this memory of you stretches outwards
like a full length feature film
that I re-watch so many times.
Your face was beneath the brim of your straw hat,
but I remember your hands.
Firm, broad hands,
huge strong knuckles,
I would say they were like men's hands,
but that's not what I mean.
The hands of one who holds the fields in her grip,
The hands of a woman who carries orchards, crops,
and the harsh, endless beating sun.
Your hands.
From the road I saw them,
one held a stick that rattled carob pods off their branches,
the other hung at your side,
overcoming me with strength and softness.
You were dressed in heavy black cotton,
and thats why, I suppose, you often slipped unseen
in your fields, like a shadow.
Moving through the seven slow years of widowhood,
walking through,
waiting through,
and shaking your carob pods off the tree.
Years later,
something hurts, when I try to form the right words
that convey the legacy you left,
grandmother,
great-grandmother,
great, great-grandmother in the field,
that day I caught your movement in the dappled shade
beneath a tree,
at the Benirràs crossroads.
One thing is clear:
We will spend our lives searching
for the rhythm that you know.
Images featuring in this piece:
< ‘peluts i pageses’, by Josep Soler, 1970’s < untitled, by Ilse Mayer Gehrken, 1970 < untitled, by Rudolph Dietrich, 1972.
Hi Jo - I just got round to reading all of these. So moving and lyrical...thank you so much for all that you do. It is extremely nourishing. x
Note: As of today, the poem at the end of this piece is finally in its correct formatting.