A promise - Solo exhibition

The closest I have ever come to occupying one of the ponds like the ones Marina González Guerreiro displays in Una promesa was in Aluche Park in Madrid in 2010. The park was inaugurated at the end of the Franco dictatorship on 27 July 1973, by the then mayor and architect Miguel Ángel García Lomas-Matas. It was inaugurated under the name of Parque Arias Navarro, in honour of the promoter of the park at the time President of the Government during the dictatorship, and was built after burying part of the high-voltage power line in the area. The neighbours never referred to it by its inaugural name. As an exercise in silent resistance they used to say: "let's go to the Luche". There is an artificial pond that was built over the old flow of the Luche stream that used to run through the neighbourhoods of Aluche, Lucero and Puerta del Ángel. The stream disappeared before the inauguration of the park when in the 1950s it was decided to canalise it. The park I lived in tried to be a sort of Arcadia where the people of the neighbourhood gathered and which, at night, became impenetrable. Today it is still a symbiosis between nature and periphery. And it is in this very place that S. and I used to spend our evenings, listening to Oi!, drinking beer and feeding the Risi brand Gusanitos ducks.