Ciudad Jardín
Photography, 120 color film

Various sizes
2025

 

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Ciudad Jardín evokes a lost order, a utopia tamed by the will of design. The gardens of Ciudad Jardín, a neighborhood in the city of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, have largely ceased to be dreamlike spaces. What was once a symbol of status and care has been transformed into a reflection of neglect. This project documents the current state of these gardens, many of them fenced off, revealing the social and political transformation of their surroundings. The image of the garden, traditionally associated with the domestication of nature and economic power, becomes a metaphor for generational shifts, the crisis of inherited heritage, and the fragility of spaces that once symbolized stability.

 

Through a series of medium-format analog photographs, the project explores the tension between nature and artifice, between what was meant to be preserved and what time, with its inexorable rhythm, has transformed. These images do not seek nostalgia, but rather the recognition of a process, making history visible through living matter.

 

The interest lies not only in the visible decay, but in what that decay represents: the passage from one generation to the next, the loss of a way of understanding public and private space, the inability to sustain an idealized past. The abandoned gardens are remnants of a promise unfulfilled, fragments of an imagined city quietly crumbling. Through the image, this project aims to capture that strange lyricism that arises when nature reclaims its territory, when neglect becomes an unintended form of landscape.