“Come Fairies, take me out of this dull world, for I would ride with you upon the wind and dance upon the mountains like a flame!” William Butler Yeats.
A flock, a thin fog, a mantle rests on the island which, for a moment, disappears from our views leading us to another site perhaps only seen or imagined in dreams, a shelter that in the depths of his being reveals us its own essence. A recurrent path is visible in the thoughts of this great poet, a deep desire, like Thoreau who he admired, by retiring to a life of “lonely austerity"; a constant getaway and escape from his everyday world in which he "grew suddenly oppressed by the weight of stone". A retirement that might be physical or from the soul to an idealized and intact site, virgin and protected as an island that lives in the depths of the heart where the essence of the being and its roots takes place. A personal site that may or may not exist. A place that is protected as a childhood memory built at the whim of our innocent imagination, as well as Yeats returns to this world of fantasies where as a child he went sometime to see the birds return to their nests at sunset. This mantle that extends above our heads take us by the hand to this unfathomable world once built under a cloak between the furniture of a house, that country of childhood and the eternal dream.
The island
Old trees emerge from the eternally unknown deep as a palpable threshold that announces the entrance to an island that in memory is different for each of us. Ephemeral, ethereal, diffuse, this mantle is blown into the isle weaving between the branches of the trees, going along with the procession of visitors submerged in an unexpected perspective that doesn't change the object (natural environment) if not the way we see it and we approach to it. The mantle provides a new layer that takes us underneath the trees a walkthrough that give us an opportunity to reexamine the position of humans in relationship to their environment and reflect on the boundary between what we are used to see and what we could see. All physical effort and mental depicting this journey culminates climbing into the highest point of the island, where the mantle that is woven between the branches is dispersed to leave an open space, intact, where nature is revealed as it is. The place of human coexistence, stacked stones where we can sit under a tree to the shelter of the light through the leaves. “And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings..”
Project in collaboration in all its stages with Joshua Ruelas and Adrian Becerra Villaseñor, architects.