The way to the sky runs underground in Second Wind, a Skyspace by James Turrell at Vejer de la Frontera in Cádiz, where a tunnel, a pyramid and a stupa in a pool come before any view upward.
The Fundación NMAC, in full the Fundación Montenmedio Contemporánea, keeps a sculpture park at Dehesa de Montenmedio, in Vejer de la Frontera, in the province of Cádiz in Andalusia. Second Wind is its Skyspace, and the foundation names the work Second Wind 2005. It defines the type plainly: a chamber built to specific proportions, open to the sky through its ceiling. A Skyspace may stand on its own or be set within a building that is already there, and its opening may be a circle, an oval or a square. At Second Wind it is a circle.
The work lies beneath the landscape of the park. Visitors reach it by a tunnel, and the tunnel brings them into an inner pyramid. Inside the pyramid stands a stone stupa, with a pool around it. Stupas are the circular domes of Buddhist building, and the foundation credits their form and their placing with "making the cosmos appear closer".
From the pyramid, a passage runs into the stupa itself and ends in a room with a round hole in its ceiling, open to the sky. There, visitors take a seat and follow the shifting light, which the foundation describes as "sculpted" by the artist. The foundation also stages a light sequence by Turrell inside the Skyspace, and it counts the sequence as part of the work itself.
Turrell particularly recommends the room at sunset, "the moment of transition from day into night, when light is at its most intense and the colours of the sky are enhanced". At that hour, the foundation says, the sky itself is perceived differently: as space, as shape and as object. The route at Vejer de la Frontera runs in one order, from the tunnel to the pyramid, from the pyramid to the stupa and its pool, and from the stupa to the room beneath the open sky.
