A promise - individual exposure

The closest I have come to occupying one of the ponds like the ones Marina González Guerreiro displays in Una promesa was in Parque Aluche in Madrid in 2010. The park was inaugurated at the end of the Franco dictatorship on July 27, 1973, by the then mayor, and architect by profession, Miguel Ángel García Lomas-Matas. It was inaugurated under the name Parque Arias Navarro, in honor of the promoter of the park who was then president of the Government during the dictatorship, and was built after burying part of the high-tension electrical lines in the area. The neighbors never referred to it by its inaugural name. As an exercise in silent resistance, they said: “Let’s go to Luche.” There is an artificial pond that was made on the old flow of the Luche stream that ran through the neighborhoods of Aluche, Lucero and Puerta del Ángel. The stream disappeared before the park was inaugurated when in the fifties it was decided to channel it. The park I lived in was intended to be a sort of Arcadia where people from the neighbourhood would meet and which, at night, became impenetrable. Today it remains a symbiote between nature and the periphery. And it is in this very place where S. and I used to spend the afternoons, listening to Oi!, drinking beer and feeding the Risi brand Gusanitos ducks.