Amusement Park: Gigi Scaria

Ever since civilisation was formed and nurtured, the city has become a fascinating phenomenon. The world started to live up to the expectations of the city and the city continuously demanded a space, character and logic of its own, in order to fulfil the aspirations of an urban nomad. Notions of politics, identity, nationalism, industrialization, modernism, lifestyle, crime, madness, spirituality and anything and everything that the human being has been proud to assert as his/her own are constantly produced and consumed by the city.

Indulging in the core of urban life made the urbanite think of himself/herself as a romantic outsider to the system that they deeply inhaled. They wanted to get out of the clutches of the system. Many who went to the wilderness of nature never returned. Many ran away from all that they belonged to, but failing to conform with the ‘outside’, came back with much more intensity and conviction that urbanism is the spiritual condition of modern man.

‘Amusement Park’ is a logical extension of an urban romanticism. Here in this park they crawled, flew, fell and screamed with a momentary transcendence of the self. A self never returned to its original self ever.

-Gigi Scaria, Delhi 2009