IBIZA — PART III

Daniela Coppini & Mouji Longhi

We at Kilometre Paris would like to present our muses: Daniela Coppini and Mouji Longhi.

La Paloma is the address on this island. Ask twenty people here where they would rather eat than anywhere else and the same two words keep coming back, from people who have nothing else in common. It has been open twenty-two years, which on Ibiza is close to geological, and it belongs to a mother and a daughter.

Daniela's passport says Daniela. In India they call her Prasuna, the name Osho gave her. And a good number of people here are convinced she is called Paloma, which is not a name at all but a bird, painted onto a sign above the door in 2004.

Mouji is her daughter, and she was the one who found the island. Born in Florence, landed here at nineteen, travelling, not intending to stay. Then she met the father of her children, who is Israeli and still lives on the island, and she stayed. Thirty years now. She had her first at twenty-one and her second at twenty-three, and at that point she called for help, and her mother came from India to answer.

Because the family had been nomadic for a while by then. Daniela was living in Pune, at the Osho commune, thinking about going further. Ibiza is good, Mouji told her. Come. So she came, and she liked it, and shortly afterwards the two of them opened a restaurant.

Daniela had just finished setting up a very successful restaurant in Milan for somebody else, Il Quattrocento, and had no wish to be in a city any more. She had been cooking her whole life, in the commune and long before it, and she learned it from her own mother.

They had no money and no experience in business, and what they found was a wreck. A block of rock and a house, an old finca, a garden gone to jungle. The jeeps that toured the island stopped there for chips and calamari. They started with one area. Then the next. Very organically, and for a long time it was only the three of them: Daniela in the kitchen, Mouji on the floor, Amit behind the bar. 10 years of that. It took a third child, fifteen years ago, before Mouji began to delegate at all.

The name and logo came from Rolf Blakstad, the architect, a great friend of Daniela's, who looked at the white shape of the building sitting above Sant Llorenç and saw a dove. He suggested the word and then painted the sign at the entrance himself.

The food was never only Italian. Daniela's ravioli, and her own mother's recipes behind them, but also everything she had picked up between India and Tuscany, in houses full of people from everywhere. So the spice was there from the start.

That was 2004. Twenty-two years ago.

Ask them what twenty-two years actually produces and Mouji tells you about an English couple. He proposed to her at one of the tables. Two years later the pair of them came back and got married here, and afterwards a photograph arrived: they had both had the La Paloma logo tattooed on their arms. God, thought Mouji, looking at that. That is an enormous amount of responsibility.

Then, the other day, a couple walked in with two children of seventeen and fifteen and mentioned that they had married here in 2005, when the place had only just opened. Daniela remembers the room and the guitar. Babies who came through that garden are twenty and thirty now. Some of them work here. Including her own.

Two things will never leave the menu: the bacalao croquettes and the bruschette. Simple, except that simple only works if you can find the right thing, and if you cannot find it then it is not good. The steak has not changed since the beginning. Lunch runs with a different chef, and the same ingredients, and the same passion. And in the evening, the chocolate fondant they are known for.

Ask about "hand made" and Daniela goes straight to cappelletti, which she and Mouji still make together every Christmas. Like tortellini, but round. Little hats, which is what the word means, from cappello. Proper chicken brodo behind it, or there is no point. Mouji says she is happy the entire time it is happening because she already knows what they are about to eat, and that the harder she concentrates the more her mother tells her to hurry up.

Daniela remembers standing in the kitchen as a small girl, asking how much salt, and being told by her mother to put in a little and she would feel it. She never gave her a recipe. Not once. Which Daniela says she is grateful for, because it forced her to develop her own intuition instead.

Food made by hand is close to mystical for both of them, and what they mean is precise. Made with presence, with good intention, with love, by somebody who actually has a vision of the thing. Maybe there were birds singing that morning and the idea came out of the birds. You can taste the difference and it is not neutral. The same goes for clothes, they say, and for anything else somebody made while paying attention.

Twenty-four hours in Ibiza depends entirely on the season, because there is far too much of it. The east, and a walk down to Aigües Blanques. Lunch at Nudo. Then south, because Daniela loves Es Boldadó, and the sunset there. Then up into Dalt Vila. Or the other direction entirely, north to Cala Xuclar, where the little chiringuito on the beach has stood for years and years, stopping on the Sant Llorenç road for a coffee at Can Gimo, which belongs to an old friend, Esteban, and where the people are good.

Given a credit card and three months, Mouji would travel, because there are far too many places she has not seen. Bhutan. And whales, which she has never once seen in her life, so something with whales. And the aurora borealis.

Daniela would buy something small on Ischia, opposite Naples, where the thermal baths are, which she says is the correct sort of thing for their age, and share it with her sisters. Then she thought about how far Ischia is from her children. So: something small here instead. Somewhere you can walk from. Somewhere further inland, because the coast has become impossible.

Diego Alonso & Alexeja Pozzoni

We at Kilometre Paris would like to present our muses: Diego Alonso and Alexeja Pozzoni.

They are interior designers, artists, curators. They design and they build spaces, and they have been doing it together for eight years, in each other's company more or less twenty-four hours a day for most of them. Alexeja came out of fashion, styling and garment production. Diego came out of art. Everything happens organically, and when the two of them are at ease magic happens. When something is forced, it does not.

Diego was born in Argentina. At six, somebody who had been to India came to Buenos Aires and he saw a Kolhapuri sandal, and he was taken by the object itself, the simplicity of it, the sense that somewhere things could be entirely different. From that afternoon he wanted to go.

He studied cinema in Buenos Aires. When everybody else after graduation left for New York or Los Angeles, he went to Bombay, because Bollywood was there. He arrived, saw how Bollywood actually functioned, and understood it had nothing to do with what he wanted, which was closer to Satyajit Ray and to experimental Indian cinema than to anything commercial. So, he became a still photographer instead, which is what he had been doing in Buenos Aires while studying, and stayed ten years.

His first exhibition was called “The Flow”, at the National Centre for Performing Arts in Bombay. He asked for the gallery and was told the programme was full for two years. So, he asked for the audiovisual room on the second floor instead, and said he would make a photo installation. The man had no idea what a photo installation was and gave him the space.

Then Diego built it. He had carpenters at the time, men who came in from the villages and had to be kept working. He found a demolition crew and took all the wood they were pulling out from and old building. Out of it came boxes, lit from inside, with images printed on transparent Kodak paper, and a cabin. Fifty people at a sitting. He played music from inside the cabin, the lights moved, and every showing was different. He was, in his own words, in a high state of mind, so each performance got better.

Then came the exhibition “Nada”, which means nothing in Spanish and sound or vibration in Sanskrit: photographs of smoke, colored with flashlights, entirely abstract. Then a call from a small publishing house in Argentina wanting a first book. He offered them abstraction. They wanted places. So, the book “Caminando” collected pictures from everywhere he had been, New York, Mauritius, India.

By 2005 India had opened its markets and the whole thing was turning commercial, so he went back to Buenos Aires to make the book, and got stuck there. Buenos Aires is magnificent, he says, and it is a dangerous place (in a good sense), and he thinks something in him was dying. What got him out was a woman he had met in Italy who ran an association raising money for villages in Tamil Nadu, building public toilets. She invited him to Milan: show the photographs, sell the books, put the money into the villages. He went, and they did exactly that.

Milan was not for him. Madrid was. He arrived to visit his brother, landed in Lavapiés, a neighborhood full of Indians, and after ten years in India it made sense: you go into a bar and you talk to people.

A brand-new gallery there gave him a show. He filled the opening by ringing everyone he knew, and the gallerist asked how a man who had been in the city ten days knew that many people. She hired him to do her communications. A few years later he opened his own gallery, MONDO GALERIA, which he still has as a nomad gallery. The Madrid space closed two and a half years ago, so now the exhibitions travel: Saint-Moritz, Ibiza, Mumbai. One of them, “Ibicenco”, has been running for twelve years, in Santa Gertrudis, Santa Agnès, and many other Ibizan traditional spaces.

He came to the island in 2015 because friends were opening a restaurant here, in Sant Rafel, in a place that had been a mythic address in the eighties and nineties. No budget, they said, but you can have a shop and somewhere to show your art. He drove over from Madrid via Valencia, arrived, and thought: what am I doing in Madrid. When he was young in Argentina, many of his parents' friends, all the hippies, were forever going to Ibiza and coming back, and the house was always full of it. The connection was already there.

Alexeja was born in Switzerland, part Italian part German. She lived 20 years in Bali where she created her company “Sample This” dedicated to fashion production in Indonesia, Hong Kong and China for brands all over Europe. She and Diego met here in 2015 and were friends for three years, and then one day she came to visit the gallery in Madrid and something happened that had not been there before. They kissed and both of them thought: another universe, what is going on? It is not nothing, he told her, it is everything. They have been together since.

Their brand is called ChAI ShOP, and it started at a yoga retreat in India. They had gone there to find out whether the thing between them was real or only a moment. During the retreat they began making chai at their bungalow, and after the classes everybody drifted over to their terrace to drink it. In India a chai shop is the one place with no hierarchy at all. Everybody is the same, nobody is above anybody. Which is exactly what they wanted in their own house, and it became the name.

The shoes were designed inspired in Venice and Marrakech, when they built a full sustainable collection for Agora, ChAI ShOP Essentials, and were surprised by how much of the industry turns out not to be sustainable at all. The first pair was made from the offcuts of the fabric they had used for Petanque Social Club in Marrakech, which was itself already recycled from Moroccan blankets. The soles are recycled bicycle tyres, bought in the markets, washed, cleaned. The cloth usually comes from Tanger and the making is done in Marrakech, where they had to find artisans willing to do it at all.

There are weavers they work with in Tangier who make cloth by hand, and one of them told them a story. In earlier years his parents made clothes, and while they worked, they burned perfume beneath the loom, in silence. The smell stays in the cloth forever, the man said. You can wash it and wash it again and the scents are still there. Diego thinks it was saffron, or something burning like incense, while they wove.

People assume an artisan is just an artist. In fact, the work is closer to mathematics: every motif in that cloth is calculated, millimeter by millimeter, before a thread is woven. Then, today, a machine copies that result, and by the time it reaches a shop it looks effortless and contemporary, as though nobody had to work any of it out. Food is the same. Somebody made it and developed it with their hands until it became a tradition that now is copied and exists everywhere in the world and can be bought finished at a supermarket. So is construction. So is wood. Our duty, Diego says, is to protect making by hand, because otherwise we lose everything and we are on our way out of culture, tradition, knowledge

Their recent projects: two restaurants in Marrakech, Petanque Social Club and Le Grand Palais. An art hub in Saint-Moritz, where Alexeja is from, combining exhibition, restaurant and performance, called “Piz Puls”. The Beach Caves at Six Senses Ibiza, which they redesigned entirely, a mural commissioned and several spaces, a restaurant, two bars, a terrace. And a small pop-up experience in Ibiza Old Town in the next weeks.

Twenty-four hours starts at their ChAI ShOP, with a meal built from organic vegetables from a farm two kilometers away, at Can Zol. The vegetables are grown to music. There is an irrigation system and there are also speakers, and every vegetable gets its own: classical, Indian, meditation. Then a drink, and a ten-minute drive up to Xarraca bay for a swim. That would be a good day. As for the night, you never know what the magic will bring.

Given unlimited money and three months, Diego would spend the lot buying up every government on the planet in order to dissolve them. Then people could build their communities organically, exchanging what they know and using the knowledge of the past to make a better future, with nobody holding power over anyone else. Not leadership. Not communism either, because communists still have leaders. Closer to individualist anarchy, where everyone is responsible for their own deeds and for the respect owed to other people, so that individualism becomes responsibility rather than selfishness.

It is what we do anyway, he points out. We look after our families and our friends and our neighbors as well as we can, and we only collaborate with systems we were born into and never chose.

Francesca Munizaga & Alonso Colmenares

We at Kilometre Paris would like to present our muses: Francesca Munizaga and Alonso Colmenares.

This was the most beautiful winter in fifty years. There was an explosion of life across the whole island, and on the farm the lake filled for the first time in eight years and held until the fifteenth of June. You see animals you do not normally see. You see lives you do not normally see. Water means everything.

They bought the place abandoned. They restored the farm, and the corrals are still not done. They planted two thousand pomegranate trees. They made Francesca's flower garden, and out of that garden came her whole world. And this year they finished Sangre de Ibiza, which is pomegranate juice, made from those trees, on that farm. A cycle closing on itself, without either of them quite noticing it was going to.

The day the first box came off the line with the label on it was, he says, probably the moment he has been proudest of anything in his life. They had said let's make a juice from the moment the trees went in. You have no idea what that actually means until you finish. A rollercoaster, a dream, and a great deal of bureaucracy. Now people love it, and it comes from here. There are two more plantations on the island now, both farmers club clients, and they buy the fruit. All organic.

Alonso runs an agency in Madrid, Flash Creativity, which turns twenty-five this year and has been his main business the whole time. A week a month there, the rest here. What he does here is the farmers club: regenerative agriculture projects for clients, building a model to bring the soil back. Around forty projects so far. It is a hard moment for it, because convincing people into agriculture is difficult when the land next to them is turning into desert.

Ten years ago Francesca's children were born and everything changed. Before that she had been living between Mexico and here, travelling, rootless, in her own word. Then Alonso, then the children, then this place, and she found somewhere to put her roots down. She became the garden. She became a florist. The Floral Studio Ibiza started with small bouquets, and then the pandemic arrived and everything went slow, except that everyone suddenly wanted a beautiful house and wanted nature, so the island called her. When it was over the work did not stop.

Growing them changes the relationship. A florist who does not grow flowers does not look at them the way she does now: she sees them, she picks them, she watches them longer. So what she tries to do is resemble nature. How they move where they are planted. How nature falls. Even when the work is architectural or deliberately artistic, she comes back to that, because it looks better.

Then there is the table, which gives her an enormous amount of joy. Everyone who comes to the house loves it. Private gatherings first, then brands wanting to do things on it, and every time she has dressed it differently, because if someone is coming here to make something it has to be new. They take the lamps, they build things. One day she filled the whole thing with moss.

Luxury, she thinks, has become the handmade. Everything now is identical and everything is fast, so what she values is anything that respects the rhythm of the place we live in and of how we actually are. Making with your hands is therapeutic. Hers go into the soil. And the truly beautiful things, the singular ones, the ones that are not the same as all the others, will be the ones that needed time, the way it used to be. Having time is the real luxury.

Twenty-four hours with him starts at Cala d'en Serra, up on the northeast, still a secret to most people. He is not much of a swimmer, but if he is going into the sea that is where he goes. Lunch at La Paloma. Then back here for the sun on the farm. With her it starts with a coffee in Santa Gertrudis, then s'Illot, then lunch here, then the night here too, because the farm is where she connects to everything and where she goes when she needs to be safe.

Given the credit card, he would go to Nicaragua. He has been connected to the country for two years and wants to find an abandoned chocolate farm from the early twentieth century, restore the factory and start a chocolate business out of it. He does not have a name yet. They have been looking at a hotel on Ometepe, the island in the middle of the lake with two volcanoes, in the jungle, which is being sold together with the micro-credit structure its owners built for the people living around it. You want to open a bicycle workshop and you have no money, so you borrow it. He read about the model years ago and cannot remember the man's name. It opened his head, and he is a person who has to be making something. He does not read poems. He wants to go there and build.

He is fifty-seven, and he says time is not what it was, and the island puts a great deal of social pressure on you, and there is always something happening. It would be a last dance.

Then, asked again, he corrects himself. First he would take his children and his family and go. But with money like that he would want to do something that helps, for children or for women, and bring his own children into it, because there are people who need us and that is a responsibility. It is difficult to leave the island.

Carol Tur

We at Kilometre Paris would like to present our muse: Carol Tur.

She buys her silver as granules. Then she melts it and alloys it with copper, electrolytic copper, at 925 to 75: nine hundred and twenty-five grams of silver in every kilo, seventy-five of copper. From that she pours an ingot. From the ingot she makes a sheet. From the sheet she draws a wire. And from the wire come the colls, the necklaces the women of the island wear with the traditional dress.

Making things by hand, she says, is putting your own essence into the thing you make. It is also collective. There are a lot of artisan markets on this island, and what they do is give all of that its value back.

Her collections take their subjects from what is already here. One from the elements. One from Posidonia. One from almond blossom. And one called Rifacus, after the embroidered petticoats worn under the island's traditional dress, the ones she had on herself the day we met. What she wants is for the person who buys a piece to be carrying a little of the island in it, rather than a piece of jewellery they could have bought anywhere. Craft, in her account, is part of the culture of every place. Some people here are from here and some are not, but given enough time you take your inspiration from wherever you are standing.

She was born in Ibiza to Ibizan parents. Her mother is from the town. For years she worked at things with no connection to creativity or craft or anything of the kind, though she had always enjoyed making things with her hands. Then she went to Barcelona, to the Massana, and studied interiors, which has nothing to do with what she does now. It was an art school, so she learned drawing and worked with teachers, and even though she never practised interiors she went on making things. Textiles at first, simpler, more childlike. Then, ten years ago, she took a jewellery course.

Saturdays she is at the Sant Josep market, half past nine to half past one. Sant Rafel at night. Sant Joan. The first Friday of every month there is a night market at Sant Josep and she does that one too. Then whatever comes up, the village fiestas when they invite the artisans, the fair in August, the Festes de la Terra on the first.

Twenty-four hours begins in the old town, in Dalt Vila, which is a UNESCO world heritage site, walking the cobbled streets and the monuments. Then the necropolis at Puig des Molins, Phoenician and Punic burials, and the archaeological museum, where the pieces run from prehistory through the Muslims and the Byzantines. She wants you to see all of it in order, because that is how you understand what an ibicenco actually is. A little of every culture. A little of every civilisation that has lived here.

Then lunch. Gastronomy matters to her for the same reason: it tells you who the people of a place are, and what they had to work with. Sa Caleta, for a bullit de peix.

A swim afterwards in a small fishermen's cove nearby. Then the west, and Cala Comte at the end of the day, with s'Illa des Bosc sitting out in front of you and the sun going down behind it.

And if the day falls right, a ball pagès. It used to be held for the harvest, when everything of that year had been gathered in. They have brought it back now. The dances, the songs, the shell blown the way they used to call the fishermen in, the old games, sack races for the children, and the food and the wine, and the costumes.

Given money and three months, she would travel, and she would go and find the countries where they make this same kind of necklace, to watch how they do it there and learn the history behind each one.