Being surrounded by nature can be a wonderful but exhausting experience. Trees, rivers, mountains, ruins, trails, and wild animals have an overwhelming energy. Your body is not able to bear it. Your body is too fragile. Nature sometimes absorbs you. The Earth sometimes absorbs you. The sound of the swollen river in winter finally stuns you. It never stops. Months and months with that constant white sound filled with the daily rain. Every day and every night.

When the winter is coming, rodents start desperately looking for food. They eat everything, the food you forgot to hide, your books, your music. Suddenly, you find yourself fighting with the rodents for food. You fear them, you hate them.

You live as if you were in a van Gogh house. Asymmetric. The floor, the roof, the windows, the chair, and your bed are distorted. Stones houses are not in line with your idea of perfection and you never needed to adapt to real dead nature. At night, the moon is too close and you can feel the way it covers all of the black skies. The stars make some nights impossible and illuminate every corner. Everything is moving up there.

You have no neighbors. You can shout, scream, and nobody will listen to you. You can be murdered and nobody will listen to you. The river, the trees, the rodents won´t help you. In fact, they will eat you and absorb you if you die.

And yet, when you decide to run away and you come back to an apartment in the middle of a beautiful city, you start to miss being devoured by nature. Because you know you are the most fragile animal in this world and just that. That is your only option. Being devoured.

 

​

Ribeira non Sacra seeks to reveal the natural atmosphere of the Ribeira Sacra, a place located in Ourense, Galicia-Spain where I was living for a year. It intends to represent the complex energy of Ribeira Sacra, a place that hides in inaccessible valleys eighteen ruins of monasteries from the early Middle Ages. Ribeira non Sacra aims to include a diversity of inexplicable powers cohabiting in that place. This work is dedicated for all the wonderful people I met in the Ribeira Sacra and it is my humble tribute to this magical place.

​