Forgotten amusement parks

The young French artist Marine Nyiri seeks out places on the periphery of civilization, which, forgotten and abandoned, lead lives of their own. She documents moments in time no other visitor sees. She visits a Brighton amusement park’s rollercoasters, carousels, and bumper cars when they are void of users and documents their packaging, the decorative lamination, and sometimes even orderly rows of carriages. The barricaded ticket-taker houses in the foreground make the scenes seem even more stage-like.

Marine Nyiri, whose series Banlieus of the infamously dangerous and looked-down upon suburbs of Paris was premiered at the Parisian Photosalon, hopes in her works to find places’ souls. Their usefulness isn’t contested, but the ability to spend much time there is called into question. In in-between moments the photographer find realities that no one else would recognize – and she experiments with everyday things that almost seem like anonymous sculptures.

In her series of momentarily paused amusement parks, she allows the colors to fade as though the present moment were receding. Even the traces visitors might have left behind have been formally erased. The objects in her photos are locked in their own rhythm of time that has no need for witnesses. Observing and illustrating a public social space and societal realities here takes on new meaning because the viewer’s gaze is met only by a location, no people.

Here Nyiri is the director of a set whose actors all must be replaced or have temporarily been banned from the set. The photographer manages to shift our gaze, unceremoniously yet therefore all the more wondrously to change our entire perception of the place and thus fights for its recognition.

Christina Wendenburg