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Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, welcome on board.
This is your captain speaking. We are currently flying
over the city of Barcelona,
and in a few minutes we will start our descent to Menorca airport.
We expect to land...
at 9.45am,
that is to say, 5 minutes before our scheduled time.
The weather in Menorca...
is cloudy and the temperature is 13 Cº.
We wish you a pleasant stay in Menorca. Thank you very much for your attention.
Native Rock.
It's been ten years since I left Menorca to go and study in Barcelona.
I've not lived on the island since;
you, on the other hand, have never left it.
I'm always on the go; you keep your feet on the ground.
Have you ever wondered why we're so different, coming from the same rock?
Well, in fact, Menorca is not made of a single rock,
but of four.
From the plane one can distinguish their colours:
white, grey, red and black.
Flight attendants, prepare for landing please.
I. BLACK ROCK
CARBONIFEROUS PERIOD 358-299 MYA
The earth is 4,570 million years old.
Everything began with a hazardous accumulation of matter,
150 million kilometres from the sun.
After the Würm Ice Age, this small rock we call Menorca
detached itself from Mallorca, and became a separate island.
One of the oldest rocks to be found in Menorca,
dates geologically from the Carboniferous Period.
The dark stone present at Cape Favàritx.
This landscape takes me back to an ancestral place,
as old as the moon.
Menorca was born here.
I begin writing a letter:
In New York all the buildings are as tall as the Cape Favàritx lighthouse.
As you walk around the city, you can't help focussing upwards.
But then, progressively, you start lowering your gaze,
and see that there's even more beauty on the human scale than up above.
I landed here three weeks ago, and so far the course is going very well.
At weekends, we make sure we leave the city.
Last weekend we went to Rockaway Beach, which is only an hour by train.
There, I found myself thinking that on the other side of the horizon,
6,300 kilometres away and six hours later, lies Menorca,
and at the heart of it, yourself.
Last year, you were ''S'homo des Be''
during the Fiesta of Saint John the Baptist in Ciutadella,
the town we were born in.
The figure represents Saint John the Baptist,
carrying the Lamb of God, that is to say, Jesus Christ.
While I was filming you, I understood that you and I have nothing in common.
The other always preserves a thin veil of mystery.
We can never know someone else entirely.
Not even a brother, not even oneself.
What does knowing actually mean?
Sometimes, when I'm filming, isolated behind the camera viewfinder,
I have the feeling that I'm very far away,
that not even by stretching my arm can I touch you.
So, on that day of the fiesta, I asked myself: Who is my brother, really?
The other day I went to Brooklyn Museum,
which is very near to where I live, and do you know what they had there?
A painting of The Man with the Lamb!
It was painted by James Tissot at the end of the 19th Century,
and it portrays the Shepherd of the Lost Sheep,
a parable from the Bible.
I've found a thousand versions of it on the Internet.
In the hard disk I brought with me to New York
there are videos I've filmed of you and our home over the last five years.
Many afternoons, when I've got nothing else to do, I go through these images.
I miss home.
Living in a city also means being very lonely.
As contradictory as it may seem to you.
In spite of my privileged position and although I'm doing what I like best,
many days I feel a rising sadness.
It's as though I was carrying around New York some guilt or other on my back.
In Luke's Gospel, Jesus asks:
''What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he loses one of them,
does not leave the ninety nine in the wilderness,
and goes after that which is lost, until he finds it?
And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing.
And when he comes home,
he calls together his friends and neighbours, saying to them,
Rejoice with me; for I have found my sheep which was lost!''
Looking at the videos of your training, a few months before carrying the Lamb,
I couldn't stop thinking the Lamb was me.
Lost in the world, far away from the hearth,
and you, Lau, came to fetch me and took me home.
I wonder if I left Menorca because I wanted to,
or because I was told that it was what I should do.
Now I'm ashamed to return empty-handed.
You, the youngest,
have always known you wanted to devote yourself to the land,
and to stay in Menorca, in order to sow that land.
I want to identify the moment in which we decided to take these different paths.
As soon as I returned from New York,
I began to rummage in the family files in search of an answer.
Ever since our work has not been going too well,
I've wanted to quit the cobbler's profession.
And the stool, I must say,
isn't made for my haunches.
I myself feel called to the cattle pens.
And uooocs, cows! On you go!
Take up a hoe, if necessary.
Sunday, and one saddles horse,
and heads to Ciutadella, with hat askew,
away we go, my friend, fast as the wind!
Here's Perico! Now he wants to be a farmhand!
When you were 10 years old you acted as Perico in the ‘zarzuela' ''Foc I Fum'',
written in 1885 by Joan Benejam,
which is performed every year in Ciutadella
before the Fiesta of Saint John the Baptist.
Perico is a cobbler's assistant,
who, in the third act, decides to leave the city and go and live in the country,
in order to become the farmhand of the farmer, who has the leading role.
The prophecy of ''Foc I Fum'' proved to be true.
In a folder in the cupboard at home
I've seen many drawings you made when you were little.
So little, and you already drew all of us in our places:
you, on the horse, I, among the crowds.
In 2014, father posted this on Facebook:
EACH IN THEIR PLACE,
THE BROTHERS HAVE MADE THE FIESTA GREATER
I've long been at sea.
I rummage in files and organize sequences.
As though my editing could solve an enigma.
To rake and thresh,
to peal the husk, to reach the grain.
II. RED ROCK
TRIASSIC 251-201 MYA
The earth seems to fester blood.
Menorca is a wounded rock, still palpitating.
Geologists say that both Cala Pilar and Cala Carbó
are where the transition
from the Carboniferous Period to the Triassic Period is most notable.
The red clay staining these beaches
is the fluvial sediment from remote waterways
that crossed the island
when human life was merely a dream of the rocks.
At that moment, Menorca was to be submerged under the ocean again,
before coming afloat, this time for good,
227 million years later.
Yet now, in less than half a century,
many of these beaches will have disappeared,
and with them, a form of happiness will vanish.
I try to find the way to talk about what will soon cease to exist.
I look backwards, because ahead of me I can only see the ocean growing,
and swallowing me.
While the Arctic melts, Menorca sinks.
So, filming the island is like filming my mother drowning.
If you listen carefully to the rumbling of the sea,
to the singing song and the deep rolling of the pebbles,
you will hear its lament.
The pearls the ''Tramuntana'' has left on this rocky ground
are sustained by walls of red mudstone,
which patiently sculpted by the wind,
look like the wrinkles in a tired and ancient hand.
A farmer's hand.
I remember the photographs by Toni Vidal,
who, like the Japanese,
saw in the rocks of Menorca faces, landscapes, whole universes.
How does the root of the wild olive manage to penetrate the stone?
I finished the course in New York a year ago,
and I've been working in Barcelona since then.
Well, ''working''...
Spring has come and I've asked my friend Cisco to let me stay
in his family's house in the Priorat,
in a small village called La Vilella Baixa.
While I'm editing, I learn from Tom Thumb.
Every shot I insert, one after the other,
is a small white pebble I drop on the path.
The pebbles will show me the way back when I'm ready to return.
But, when I look back, the images I've edited
appear different every time I go through them.
They open up new routes and waylay me,
instead of orienting me towards my return.
When you're editing, you spend hours and hours with the people you've filmed.
I know every detail of your gestures.
It's a strange feeling.
I can spend the whole afternoon next to you, inside this timeline,
but at the same time, I'll be profoundly alone.
Stuck in this hole.
I must get out of here.
At the top of the village, after half an hour's walk,
one arrives at a rocky formation that reminds me of the clayey crags in Menorca.
They're called ''Els Rogerets''.
They also are red mudstones from the Triassic Period.
Some studies connect the geology of Pirorat with Menorca's northern coast,
as though it were a single arm of stone.
This is probably why I feel at home here.
We could say the ''Rogerets'' are the brothers
of the Menorcan rocks in the Forest of s‘Arangí.
When the wind whistles, one seems to hear the voices of the rocks
singing out through the crevices.
What do they want to tell us?
Saint John the Baptist said he heard a distance voice.
At last he understood that it was not someone else's voice,
but the echo of his own voice.
God put the words on the lips of the Precursor.
John was just a voice crying in the desert.
You and I have never talked much.
I don't know if this is a male thing, or a brother thing,
or simply that you and I are this way.
Mother is a chatterbox and knows how to say things well.
We could have learned a little from her!
Father is more like us,
saying things in silence, as he paints them.
You, Lau, how do you say things?
My way must be this letter,
the way of a coward,
who is afraid of saying certain things in a certain manner.
One who doesn't dare to speak to someone
to his or her face.
I throw the stone and hide my hand.
I listen to Saint John's echo.
My questions come back to me, unanswered.
Whose is the word I murmur?
Is it you, Lau, who speak inside me:
''How come you miss Menorca so much?''
''Do you want to come back home?''
I look for an opening, a fissure, through which I may filter my voice,
so that it remains within the rock.
So that the words form a sediment on it and offer a reply.
III. GREY ROCK
JURASSIC 201-161 MYA
Where are the island's limits?
With the monstrous pressure of the Baetic Cordillera,
from the Triassic clays arise the dolomite rocks,
the colour of lead. They look like the blade of a knife
cutting the sea vertically.
The millenary persistence of the Tramuntana
grinding down the dolomite rocks
sculpts the arid plain of Punta Nati.
A silver desert.
When I was young, father drew this landscape repeatedly,
captivated by what he described as ''a sculptural nakedness,
a thin exhausted earth,
a rocky land of time and effort''.
I try to make my camera and my voice resemble his manipulation of the brush.
An invisible gesture.
This monotonous extension
is only interrupted by the dense graticule of dry stone walls.
Every farmer in Menorca must master this technique
in order to re-erect their collapsed stone wall enclosures.
Josep Pla visited the island in 1948, and wondered:
''If one were to put the walls side by side, how far would they reach?''
According to the data of the Cartography Institute,
they would extend more than 11,000 kilometres.
We could encircle the moon with them.
Stone by stone, and wall by wall,
you could build a bridge from Menorca to America.
I'm back in the U.S.A., but not in New York.
The Union Docs team,
the Brooklyn Centre for Documentary Art where I took the course last summer,
has invited me to an editing retreat in the north of the city.
We live in a house, designed by Bauhaus architect
Marcel Breuer,
and commissioned by the MoMA in 1949.
One of the Rockefeller Brothers
bought it
and transferred it stone by stone to Pocantico,
a park owned by his family,
where they built their mansion in 1913.
The Rockefeller house reminds me of the Truqueries estate in Menorca,
dating back to the 17th century.
Both constructions are inspired by Italian Classicism.
Its clay-coloured houses have been abandoned for years.
This estate housed different generations of our maternal family.
Grandfather Maties ''from Ses Truqueries'' was born here.
He was a peasant all his life.
He died very young.
He was only 66 years old.
Two years after grandfather Maties left us,
you made this drawing,
based, I imagine, on this photograph of him,
where he is portrayed as a ''Caixer fadrí''.
It was 1954.
In 2014, we tried his outfit on you.
In 1992, grandfather participated for the last time in ''sa qualcada de Sant Joan''.
I was 2 years old,
and it would still be 2 years before you were born.
22 years later, dressed in grandfather's waistcoat,
you participated in the ''qualcada'' for the first time.
When grandfather Maties died,
our family was left without farmers,
and the ''Tanques Macià'' were barren.
But echoes do not only travel across distances,
but also through time and generations.
Without having known him,
you have assimilated grandfather's heritage.
I have the feeling your identity is granite
like a dolomite rock,
whereas mine erodes every day like a ''marès'' sandstone.
The dolomite rock nails itself to the firm,
perennial earth,
warden of a buried past that is slowly disintegrating.
This is how its body is, and this is its way of being in the world.
But ''marès'', quite to the contrary, is not defined by what it is,
but by what it ceases being.
It owes itself to the sea and the wind.
Its existence consists of it threshing.
Its final meaning is erosion,
all the way down to absence.
An absence that nevertheless
whistles and can fly free.
Stone becomes bird.
When I film others, it's as though I'm asking them questions.
I try to find in them an orientation useful to me.
One who films, searches.
One who is filmed, lives.
To watch you, Lau,
puts me in my place,
and raises the question in me about what the hell I'm doing,
about where my head and feet are.
I would like to turn around, and remain whole,
like lighthouses do.
An anguishing thought begins to spin in my head:
perhaps I'll never live in Menorca again.
To say this out loud liberates me.
I must learn to separate whom I am from where I come from.
The island's limits are the contours of my body,
contours which stretch with the extent of my embrace.
My camera frames the island's limits.
The island's limits fit inside a fist.
I carry a stone in my pocket.
IV. WHITE ROCK
NEOGENE 23 MYA - PRESENT
If the most ancient rock in Menorca is black,
the most recent is white.
These rocks, as though waking up from an atavistic semi-darkness,
now radiate the light locked within them.
The white stone doesn't split open, nor does it bear remote wounds.
It is porous, it permits a caress. It heals.
A combination of limestone reefs from the Miocene,
formed by coral and seaweed sediments,
consolidate along the south of the island
in a gentle and fragile orography
that ends on the white sand beaches.
The big limestone platform of the Migjorn
is made of clastic rock,
''living stone''.
With the obstinate grinding of the sea,
the ''living stone'' was gradually polished
until it gave birth to the most precious rock in Menorca:
the ''marès'' sandstone.
This rock, delicate and vaporous,
yet of solid foundations,
is the one the islanders have used for centuries
to build their houses.
The first Menorcans, the Talaiotic people,
developed a culture based on the veneration of stones.
Stones, if wisely organized,
shelter us and protect us.
But, beyond that,
stones are fallen stars,
chippings from the sky.
They give us a taste of the memory of the Universe,
a hint of infinity.
A serene infinity.
The Talaiotic people
filled the island with ''cantons'',
parallelepiped blocks of fine-grained limestone,
which they carried there by means of a great communal effort.
This practice has been transmitted from generation to generation until this day.
The whole of Menorca's southern region is dotted with deep ''marès'' quarries,
from which the rock is extracted for construction.
Since the 19th century,
the old quarry workers have been labouring,
pick in hand, in the quarries of s'Hostal de Ciutadella,
pulling out the ''cantons'' to build the village houses.
One of the quarry workers here
was our great-grandfather, Toni Florit,
born in 1897.
Father always tells how he was called ''es pastisset'',
because he came back home caked with ''sauló'', a thin dust resembling sugar.
It was he who in the 1960's invented the rock cutter,
when he was making these geometrical pits.
In order to build,
you first have to break and cut the rock.
The rock is sculpted
until it's entirely emptied.
It's ironic to think that in order to build their little homes,
Menorcans perforate authentic inverted skyscrapers.
A New York excavated right next to our house.
A kilometre away from the quarries
lie the enclosures, where our grandfather Maties
worked as a farmer.
The ''Tanques Macià.''
When he died he left them to his sons.
Mother inherited ''Na Llarga'', the largest enclosure,
and we decided with our father that we would build our home here.
The construction works began when you were 8 or 9 years old.
Following the inherited architectural tradition,
father wanted us to have our own ''marès'' quarry,
from where the ''cantons'' would be extracted to build the house.
The four-edged vault that crowns it
was erected by an uncle of father's,
heir to the skills of ''es pastisset'',
his ancestor, a builder.
The Menorcans who migrated to Algeria in the late 19th century,
many of them labourers and builders,
stowed ''cantons'' of ''marès'' from the island,
both to construct the assigned public works in Algiers,
and to build their new homes.
The longing of the exiles was wiped away inside their stone houses,
the roots of their land.
The ''cantons'' of white ''marès''
have protected us with fresh shadow in the summer,
and with shelter, in the winter.
You and I are sons of its porosity and its gleam.
Your love of the land originated here,
the land you now harvest within the same enclosures
that were sowed by our grandfather.
Identities, like geological strata,
never come to rest.
We two have not stopped doing what enriches our lives and makes us happy.
You, in Menorca, and me, abroad.
But my movement and your stillness
are, in the end, inconsequential.
MACIÀ AND LAU LISTENING TO SCHUBERT:
BROTHER LAU WILL BE HERE IN A FEW WEEKS
- Is it recording? - Yes.
- Does it capture the crop lines? - No.
No, no. They come out black. You have to focus, don't you?
- Where's the zoom? - There isn't one.
- How come? - 'Cause it's a fixed lens.
God, what a gadget.
- No zoom? - No.
I can barely see if it's in focus or out of focus.
You may not move,
but under your feet the stones continue to be in perpetual collision.
That day, the ''Dia des Be'',
after walking 12 hours barefoot around Ciutadella,
you went up to the house of the ''Caixer pagès''
to unload the animal for the last time
and celebrate that everything had gone well.
I, like during the rest of the day, went after you with my camera.
When you went to hug mother and father,
I felt
you were thanking them
for everything they had done for you
during all the days that had preceded that moment.
Then you turned around.
My gesture of abandoning the camera to hug you
is of more significance than this entire movie.
And it's not filmed.
At that moment, and now,
I understand that making this film will not help me to be with you again,
nor to redeem my origins.
You have no home until you leave it,
and once you're gone, you'll never be able to go back to it.
I've gone away to be able to look back,
to understand where I come from.
Because, without a distance, I cannot film.
From this distance, sometimes of inches,
sometimes with an ocean between,
I've been able to observe the island, and you,
thereby preserving your elusive plenitude.
The plenitude which I have filmed and condensed in memory.
The island is a sinking rock.
Your body, a mineral fossil.
I've looked at the rock closely
in order to break into it and to root myself there again.
But the trench has been burrowed inside me,
dug by longing.
A trench which originated in my departure from the island
and grows wider with distance and the erosion of time.
A trench that inside me becomes a quarry,
and which, from the emptiness that has been dug out, I make my own home.
A house with space for everything I love.
It's precisely in this that love consists,
learning to love erosion.
Your brother, Macià.