IBIZA — PART II
Photos by Sarah Forgie
At Kilometre Paris, each piece seeks to tell a story of travel through Couture & Embroidery. With our 'Caravans', we invite you to join us on our worldly travels and experience unique events in which fashion meets storytelling.
Through our stops around the world, we shine lights on each of our 'muses': those exceptional individuals who inspire us with their passions and their individuality. These encounters offer the opportunity to immerse yourself in a universe where each garment, crafted with care & detail, represents a journey, an enriching experience which we hope to share.
Under the direction of Alexandra Senes, we've documented these exchanges, offering an intimate & authentic way of celebrating our creations. This ninth edition of Caravan takes place in Ibiza, with 8 inspiring muses, each enriching our adventure. Join us on an unforgettable journey of fashion and creativity.
Carolyn Roumeguere & Cassia-Peia Douglas-Dufresne
We at Kilometre Paris would like to present our muses: Carolyn Roumeguere and Cassia-Peia Douglas-Dufresne.
Start with the rings, because they are all on the same hands and they do not match, and that is the point. The classical ones came out of old Italian master paintings, where the women wore a stone that looked as though it had been pressed straight down into the gold. One Carolyn did not design at all: found on her travels, then loaded with emeralds afterwards. One is Native American and silver, so she dipped the whole thing in gold. One is a tribal ring in camel bone and she set the stone into it herself. One is hers, gold, with a dragon on it, because her Chinese sign is a dragon. And one carries an aquamarine, bought from the only fair trade mine on earth, worked entirely by women, in Zimbabwe. Zimbaqua. She loves aquamarines this colour, and she will tell you so twice.
Kenya is where she grew up and where she still lives, so it is not a stop on a list. Everything else is. Filigree in silver and gold comes out of Mexico. Jaipur, where anything at all is possible. And Kenya again for cow horn and bone, because the carving is exceptional and she happens to be standing there anyway. The method never changes. Go somewhere, find what the people already do brilliantly, and bend the designs to fit them rather than the other way round.
Anything made by hand carries the energy of whoever made it. An embroidered piece carries the breath of the embroiderer, and behind her, the breath of whoever wove the cloth. You are supporting people in a traditional art handed down across generations, and you are walking away with something nobody else on earth will have.
Ask Carolyn who she is and the answer is that she loves life. Every challenge is an opportunity to grow. What matters is what we make of what happens to us. She believes in many lives, she is interested in how we answer what the universe puts in front of us, she has never once looked backwards, and she is writing the book.
She makes jewellery and she builds houses, and the second one surprises people. Her first job, at twenty-one, was redesigning rooms for a hotel in Kenya. Then a decade or two as a set decorator in London, through her twenties and her thirties. Now she builds for clients in America, one of them a friend who wanted a house like hers, and she takes the construction and the decoration and everything in between.
Carolyn moves fast. She arrives somewhere and the pictures are up and the entire place is arranged inside a day. She once moved into a house with no sheets on the grounds that the priority was Moroccan lanterns and rugs.
And she would not be an interior decorator for anything. The style is hers, bohemian, treasures picked up along the way, handmade things, whatever else has attached itself, thoroughly eclectic. Working inside somebody else's taste is not a thing she wishes to do.
Twenty-four hours starts at Cala Xuclar, four minutes from her house, first thing, straight into the water. Coffee comes in a flask because nothing is open, and even at the height of July and August nobody else turns up before ten. So she swims, she meditates, she writes. Then Cala d'en Serra, a beautiful drive, with a chiringuito for coffee or lunch. Busy in July, but take a paddle out, find a rock, and there is nobody. Then back to the chiringuito at Xuclar, which is her favourite of the two. Everything local, everything in the north, and she can almost walk the whole day.
Give Carolyn a credit card and she goes straight home to Kenya, where there are already projects running. A group of women far to the north, working with the Milgis Trust, where almost no tourists go and the weaving is extraordinary. She buys the beads, hands them over with no brief whatsoever, and they make whatever they want. What comes back is art. That goes on to the groups working with the Samburu Trust, who do the beading on the cushions, and there is another group again doing baskets. One enormous order to all of them, then a shop here in Ibiza to sell the work, because they are extraordinarily good, and because in a world of mass production everyone alive is looking for the one thing nobody else can have.
Her daughter is named after a constellation. Cassia-Peia, for Cassiopeia, because both her parents loved the stars and her father was a stargazer who never missed a chance to impress a room with it. The name got shortened by her younger brother, Dylan, and it stuck.
Peia grew up watching the adults around her build organizations that helped the communities around her. Her mother among them, and an aunt running a conservation organisation with the Samburu in northern Kenya. So she read international relations and sustainable development, throughout spending time back north to work on projects with the Samburu on indigenous knowledge and how to hold on to it in a world that will not stop changing. She worked on an internship with jaguars in the Pantanal in Brazil. She has lived in Peru and in Mexico.
Her position, and she is firm about it, is that key to conservation are the local communities living inside the land they are trying to protect, and that those communities are the entire mechanism. Work with them, everyone benefits, and it lasts. South America or Kenya, or somewhere else in Africa: that is where she intends to be. Whatever we can do alone, Peia says, is less than what we can do together, and the difference echoes into the generations after us.
Which is the daughter of a woman who spent her life finding out what a place is already good at, and adapting to it.
So: Carolyn would take her son — Dylan — and daughter — Peia —, and her friends, to places she has never been. Patagonia. Mongolia. Find the artisans there, and start something.
Daniela Agnelli
We at Kilometre Paris would like to introduce the woman behind Agora: Daniela Agnelli.
Sometimes a bag carries the name of the woman who made it. And how long it took her. And what the fabric is, and where the fabric came from. Which is the entire point of the exercise. At Agora, you are not simply buying an object; you are buying the story of the person who made it. From that moment on, you know what you are wearing.
The shop is Agora, inside Six Senses Ibiza, overlooking Xarraca Bay at the northern tip of the island, near Portinatx. Daniela conceived it five years ago with her friend Tiffanie Darke: the idea, the curation, and the reason for it to exist. You can easily lose three hours there discovering designers you have never heard of, because it was never only about the clothes. It is about craftsmanship, provenance and people. They work closely with artisans, some from Ibiza and others from much further afield.
There was no budget to purchase stock upfront. Instead, the brands believed in the concept and agreed to work on consignment. The result is greater variety, more thoughtful buying, and no pressure to over-purchase only to discount later. They do not hold sales. In fashion retail that is almost heresy, yet they have made it work for five years.
Daniela is Italian and spent more than thirty-five years in London, where she built an editorial career spanning some of the world's leading fashion publications. She worked at Marie Claire, then spent fifteen years at The Telegraph, across both the newspaper and the magazine, before joining Condé Nast International, where she worked on the launch of international editions of Vogue, including Arabia, Poland and Greece.
Then Covid changed everything. Daniela moved to Ibiza, where she met the owner of Six Senses as the project was taking shape. He showed her a room that looked more like a gallery space than a shop and spoke about creating something beyond the conventional hotel boutique. Daniela immediately thought of her friend Tiffanie Darke, another former London editor, and together they conceived Agora: a space where every object has a story, every maker has a voice, and every purchase carries meaning.
After more than three decades selecting fashion for magazine shoots and editorials, she now chooses pieces for real people. The shift brought its own learning curve, but it also brought fashion closer to everyday life and to the values that matter most to her.
There is a magazine too: Xarraca Journal, named after the bay. It is published annually in an edition of 500 copies, distributed at the hotel and available in the shop. Everything in it comes from the north of the island, a part of Ibiza with its own distinct creative identity. Fashion, art, music and the people making extraordinary things there. The creative community surrounding both Agora and the journal continues to grow. Ask Daniela what she would do with more money and her first answer is simple: print more copies.
Twenty-four hours in the north of Ibiza begins at Agora, which she offers without a flicker of embarrassment, and rightly so. Then Cala Xuclar for a swim and a long lunch. If the heat allows, a walk inland to places where people have gathered, celebrated and made music for generations. Another swim. Sunset, which she considers one of the most beautiful on the island. Coffee in Benirràs as the light fades. Dinner at La Paloma, where the tables sit among the trees and, for an evening, everything feels a little more Italian.
After that it depends. Dancing, which Daniela will happily arrange for you but almost certainly won't attend. A weekly music gathering where many of the musicians are simply passing through. Or Terra Iris, a natural amphitheatre hidden in the forest, where the night quietly becomes morning.
Given a credit card and three months, her first response is that it sounds frightening. Then she begins to imagine. She would invest further in what she has already started building: supporting artists, independent designers and makers with ideas but limited resources. She would continue strengthening the creative community around her and creating projects with purpose. And perhaps she would finally make a little time for herself.
Then she hands the card back. She does not really want the money. For Daniela, money is simply another form of energy. What matters is creating something meaningful, with integrity and generosity. Do that, she believes, and the rest has a way of finding you.
Stephanie and Giancarlo Canavesio
We at Kilometre Paris would like to present our muses: Stephanie and Giancarlo Canavesio.
What they are building sits in the old town of Ibiza, in the streets of Sa Penya, and it has taken about twenty-five houses to make it. Apartments, therapy rooms, a yoga centre, a gallery, a bar, a restaurant, a lounge. Not one building. A whole neighbourhood, worked on street by street, with the therapists living in it alongside the people who come to stay.
The regeneration of a neighbourhood, Giancarlo says, is also a metaphor for the regeneration of an individual.
The model has a name and they took it from Italy. In the seventies and eighties the Italian government began issuing hotel licences to anyone willing to bring an abandoned medieval village back to life, so that one operator could run rooms scattered across the whole village as a single hotel. Puglia, Sicily, everywhere. An albergo diffuso: a hotel that is spread out. Theirs is private, and it is called Difuso.
The ecosystem is the point. Everybody's paths cross, because they live in the same streets. Alongside the traditional healing session there is the idea of healing as a way of living: art presentations, talks, a community barbecue with talks attached. What they want to establish is the conscious gathering. You can talk about sex, you can talk about anything, but there has to be an intention that brings people together, and by naming that intention out loud everyone leaves slightly expanded.
Not just turning up and dancing. Stephanie does not want that to sound puritan, and dancing is good, but a celebration should be a celebration of something. A solstice. A full moon. With a moment of awareness that we came here to connect.
Her argument for it is technical. When someone runs compassion work at group level, what happens in the field is co-regulation. Whenever people sit in a circle and share their vulnerability, a field emerges and information transfers across it that we do not understand, at a subatomic level, a quantum level, things surface in one person that belong to somebody else and nobody knows why. So when you gather people, it is an extraordinary missed opportunity not to give it some direction. If you are going through a difficult time, togetherness is enormously healing for the nervous system. And simply being seen and heard matters in a culture this separated, where we have learned to fall out with each other over holding different opinions. What she wants are rooms where diverse groups can sit down, say what they have understood, and listen closely without necessarily agreeing.
She has been doing this since around 2016, first as a meditation teacher, then training as a psychotherapist. She guides people through their own transformation with breathwork, with meditation, and with psychotherapy. The method she works with is Compassionate Inquiry: feeling into what is underneath, understanding it, unwinding the mind so that you can arrive in the heart and live more connected, more whole, more aligned with your purpose.
The hand, for Giancarlo, is straightforward. It is connected to the heart. So when we create by hand, we create by heart, and that is close to the essence of what he considers great about being human: to make things with our hands, and to receive them. In a world this commercialised we have become that disconnected, and handmade may simply be the way back.
He also runs Mangusta Productions, a small documentary company working on consciousness, cosmic consciousness, regeneration. Asked to name three films, he declines to look backwards and names three from the future instead. One called Entity. One about the Shipibo artist Sara Flores, from Peru. And one they finished some time ago about regenerative agriculture on this island, still waiting for the right screening opportunity, which will land on their own platform.
On why any of this happens here: since the sixties, when Americans arrived rather than go to Vietnam, Ibiza has attracted the black sheep, the people who did not want to be categorised. Look at the photographs from then and everyone is dancing with everyone, the rich man and the poet and the artist and the drug user, one large family of people pushed to the edges, finding each other. That open-mindedness continues. It has become very expensive, and some of the artists have been pushed out, and that is a real problem. But outside those few weeks in summer, the year-round community still draws independent thinkers, and the environment they found here, in terms of people who feel and support each other, is unique. There is a line about the island: healers, dealers, dreamers and entrepreneurs.
Twenty-four hours with Stephanie, on a Saturday: the market at Sant Jordi before ten, which is flea market and Moroccan carpets and Indian things and hippie things and plants and animals and everything at once. Then Salinas beach early, when it is calm, over on the left among the rocks. Coffee in town. Then north to Sant Vicent for a walk, with a picnic. And Punta Galera at the end for the sunset, where there is a large rock to swim from.
With Giancarlo, in spring, when the almond blossom is out: stay in Dalt Vila, then the museums between there and Sa Penya, which is where the culture concentrates. MACE. Casa Broner, the house museum of the architect. The new maritime museum at the end of Calle de la Virgen. And Sa Peixateria, the old fish market becoming a cultural centre, beautiful and circular. Then lunch: a Mediterranean and Asian place with pasta with clams and bottarga, and a tuna spring roll with plum, and carpaccio. Then dinner at the restaurant opposite Teatro Pereira, and possibly the theatre itself. For the nature, walk down from Dalt Vila to Punta Calvary and get in, cold in spring but excellent, and follow the buoys along the coast for an hour's swim.
Given billions, Giancarlo would start many things. His own work now sits at an intersection of regenerative agriculture, conscious urbanism, architecture, heritage, therapy and community building, so he would finish his project here, hire a team, and take the model out to the places where it belongs: Bali, Goa, Tulum, islands in Panama, Mauritius. And into degraded neighbourhoods in Barcelona, Madrid, Soho. Buy the whole village and build a megaphone for applied consciousness.
Stephanie would go into communities with large tents, so that people can meet and gather in them. Spaces where people feel safe enough to express their own vulnerability, because it is in that expression that we have the power to transform.
Guillermo Romero Parra
We at Kilometre Paris would like to present our muse: Guillermo Romero Parra.
He runs a gallery. It has been in Madrid since his parents opened it and it has had a second life in Ibiza for years now, and the thing everybody remembers about it is not the art. It is the dinners.
They looked like weddings. Two hundred people at a sitting, guests arriving from everywhere, and here is the part that makes them his: thirty or forty places held back every single time, kept empty on purpose, for whoever wanted to join. Not the collectors. Not the list. Anybody. Guillermo can tell you about the owner of a bank seated next to somebody who had wandered in off the street to look at the show and turned out to be an artist from the island.
Which is not decoration. It is the whole argument.
The Ibiza he cares about has nothing to do with the cliché, and the cliché is always parties. So he will not send you to the parties, and he will not send you to restaurants either, because what this island actually consists of is its people, and among them there are no hierarchies. Go to a small family place in a village instead. Santa Gertrudis makes the case: Bar Costa, Macao, a very good shop or two, but the point is never the address, it is who is sitting there. People from every culture and every country, living discreetly, nobody knowing who anybody is. In the seventies that was simply normal, and the very rich danced with the very poor. VIP culture took it away. A certain number of people are working very hard to get it back, and he seats forty of them at dinner.
Guillermo was born in May 1978, so he is forty-eight. He read history, then specialised in modern and contemporary art at Christie's Education in London, and worked in galleries there including White Cube and Victoria Miro. New York was offered. He has friends in the United States and has never once felt connected to the country, so he went back to Madrid instead, took over his parents' gallery in 2005, and changed completely how he intended to run it.
The gallery carries his mother's name. Pilar Parra. Spanish convention puts the father's surname first, Romero before Parra, and he put hers in front. Part of the same decision.
Apertura, Madrid's gallery weekend, was his idea, and he talked every other gallery in the city into it. Six years on the ARCOmadrid organising committee, and advisory work for ARCOlisboa. Fourteen years at FIAC. Twelve at Art Basel Miami Beach. Frieze New York, Frieze Masters, and now Frieze Seoul. And eleven years teaching art market studies at the University of Salamanca, which is the part nobody mentions.
The programme is precise, and it is a single idea: artists who belonged to the movements of their moment, or helped define them. ZERO, and Heinz Mack. Conceptual art, and Robert Barry and Luis Camnitzer. Then Claudio Parmiggiani, Turi Simeti, Ian Wallace, Jeff Wall, the Scottish painter Callum Innes, Jean-Marc Bustamante, and Helmut Federle, one of the great Swiss abstract painters. And then the younger ones working inside those same strategies and extending them. Landon Metz is next: post-minimalist painting that evokes the body erotically, and with a great deal of restraint, playing with the emptiness of the canvas and the movement of forms across it.
First the idea, second the object. And after decades of movements built on ideas, the object still matters, and how the object was made matters more. Artists get surrounded by the pressure to produce at a larger and larger scale. When Guillermo teaches, he tells his students to build the idea out of whatever material is lying around them rather than reaching for more and more technology. Make an object that tells your story out of things you can hold in your own hands, and that are already there.
This island has a deep ceramics tradition, so this year the gallery began representing artists from Ibiza. Laura de Grinyó, whose ceramics come out of that tradition and carry it into a new modernity. The younger artists here work seriously, and they keep returning to the materials and the crafts of the place.
Then Madrid, and a show he calls one of the most beautiful things he has ever done: Ugo Mulas, whom the gallery represents, who photographed the Venice Biennale straight through the fifties, sixties and seventies. What you see in those pictures is how artists related to each other in difficult times, and how they held each other up. We live in an individualistic age now. There are no movements any more. There were movements before because people rallied around ideas and used them to confront the world. Today everyone turns inward. Perhaps that changes. The exhibition is asking the question rather than answering it.
He has just finished a book about Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian Empire, which sent him thinking about what human rights mean now between civilisations in that same region. Revisit the history, he says, then look at the present, then bring something new to it.
He is also writing a novel, part fiction and part his own life, and he needs three months to finish it, and he has been carrying it for years.
Guillermo came here as a teenager. Later, having travelled and looked properly around him, he noticed that almost no international art was being shown inside Spain, and that Ibiza was one of the most international places in the country. There is the intellectual tradition too: artists and writers and thinkers have been drawn here since the thirties, Walter Benjamin among them. So the gallery was never only meant to be a commercial space. It is a window, open to anyone who wants to know what is happening in art now and elsewhere. They bring people here to discover Ibiza, and they offer Ibiza to the people arriving from outside.
Given a credit card and three months, if it were for himself: a beautiful, inexpensive hotel, and a very long time in it, writing. Or a longevity clinic, which he would also like to try, and which is a rather different holiday. If it were for other people, he would help the ones he already knows need it. And keep a little back for himself, to stay in the best shape he can.
