FORGOTTEN FUNFAIRS

video-installation with found footage videos of abandoned amusement parks
(among others: Ukraine (Pripyat), Hungary (Budapest), South Korea (Geoje Island),
Germany (Berlin) and the USA (New Orleans), 2014
48''07'

garden swing, chain of lights, garland with artificial flowers
Picture source: Hannes Woidich

"Forgotten amusement parks: Dreamland on Coney Island, New York, Prypiat Park near Chernobyl, Six Flags next to New Orleans - fire, radioactivity, the hurricane Katrina. Many of the abandoned parks tell a story of natural or man-made catastrophes.* Originally meant to entertain the masses the fun factor of the planned adrenaline rush turns into real danger.

'It's been forever already, everybody's gone home, Ocean City's deserted, the ghost-crabs are tickling across the beach and down the littered cold streets. And the empty halls of clapboard hotels and abandoned funhouses.'**

Facing the overgrown parks, the rotten mascots and the decaying attractions the visitors find themselves 'Lost in the Funhouse' (John Barth). 'Lost' not necessarily in the spatial-physical experience of the chamber of mirrors but in the sense of being lost in the meta-level of personal thought fragments, reflections and associations through which the morbid fascination for these pictures and scenes of decay arises in the first place."
Gaby Peters

** Barth, John. Lost in the Funhouse. In: Lost in the Funhouse. Random House, New York: 1988, p. 86/87.
* Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York. The Monacelli Press, New York: 1994, p.29-80.