Spirituality in Gibraltar follows its own local logic. Around the base of the rock, in the dense town and port, cultures mix and intersect and negotiate in streets and buildings. Churches, mosques and synagogues, religions have found places – sometimes highly traditional senses i
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Spirituality in Gibraltar follows its own local logic. Around the base of the rock, in the dense town and port, cultures mix and intersect and negotiate in streets and buildings. Churches, mosques and synagogues, religions have found places – sometimes highly traditional senses in their symbolism, sometimes not. These communities reach a balance and form the dynamics of the peninsula. The compression reinforces the difference of certain beliefs, a fierce shared sense of coexistence as well as a multi-faith and Gibraltarian identity. Currently, they share a cemetery located at the junction of the airport and the city center, not just creating a religious blending atmosphere, but also being under the pressure coming from invasive city expansion. Above the settlement, they make designs in, on and around the Rock. Technologies, structures, and spaces from different centuries have erected a Vibrant vein of the Rock, as if the Rock is evolving by itself. From prehistoric burial chambers undergoing hi-tech archaeological research to world-war tunnels reinvented as tourist destinations, from man-size caves to large tunnels enabling transportations to pass through, incursions into the Rock such as abandonment, reinforcement, renovation and extension are made according to available technology for the rituals and requirements of the day. Developed trajectories of both tunnels and religions are similar, they can reflect and compensate each other, allowing both contradiction and similarities co-exist simultaneously. This project takes the phased relocation of Gibraltar’s multi-faith cemetery from its hard-to-survive site on flat ground and prime real estate adjacent to the airport, to a steeply sloping, east-facing site of defunct “Water Catchment” that are barren lands nowadays as the basis both for reassessing spirituality in, on and of the rock, and for reinventing the ways in which spaces are made in, on, and of it. The shared funeral system with introduced ecological methods continuously change the life forms and textures of the Rock with the help of vegetations as new tombs, which is slow in process but full of energies, making a comparison with the high-speed developing urban environment.Life does not end but continues in another way.