Cruising El Retiro

“The ordinary practitioners of the city live 'down below', below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk – an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban 'text' they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other's arms. The paths that correspond in this interwinning, unrecognized poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility. It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness. The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other.”

Michel de Certeau The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, 1985/2011, pg. 93.

Cruising is an everyday practice through which gay population re-appropriate planed urban public spaces – cruising grounds. Documenting and reenacting the practice has been done as a part of individual art project at SpaceID Madrid with the aim of defining the queer identity of a urban place and affirming an authentic gay practice based on open and communal experience of sexuality. Alex, Giada, Maria, Tonči and a passerby, a practitioner of cruising in the park, were in El Retiro cruising zone in the evening hours on Thursday, 11^th July 2013. Cruising was reenacted by Tonči and the passerby, Giada documented steps that mark the territory and Maria documented traces of sexual activities happened in the space. A map that confronts different layers of the space, the planed structure of the park with the practice of cruising that happens there, represented in a sequence of photos of walking and photos of traces of sexual activities found in the park, were produced afterwards and exhibited at Eskalera Karakola in Calle Embajadores, Madrid.