Apparatus of Amusement

Aum Gohil

India

THESIS DETAILS:

Thesis by Aum Gohil Project Name: Apparatus of Amusement Type of Project: Cultural, Commercial Location: Irla, Mumbai

The trigger that started the enquiry for ‘Apparatus of amusement’ was through the understanding of the age of Anthropocene and the impact that humans have created on the surroundings through the commodified world we live in. Tracing the roots which have led up to this capitalist setting of the society, the factors affecting it and the consumerist strategies which leads to a numb state of mindless consumption by deciphering the epitome of consumerist typology of ‘shopping mall’. These extravagancies lead to the collective notion of excesses termed as ‘waste’.

Further, the study tries to map the end of life journey of an everyday object in an urban setting of Mumbai through understanding the formal excess network in Mumbai, role of the informal agents and the existing repurpose network. Now, what if we consider a point in transition from post-consumption till it gets considered as trash, the project offers alternate repurpose solutions for the second life of the objects categorized into household objects, fashion and electronics, and a proposed network of these post-consumption processes which informs the shortcomings of our primary system of waste management and the exceeded landfills.

These alternate systems are experimented in an existing retail setting of dysfunctional shopping mall, the Prime mall of Irla market street, the street has a vibrant retail character which fails to reflect when the typology of a mall is inserted in the scenario. While mapping the current use of the mall, it was concluded that 60 percent of the mall was not functioning and hence it needed programmatic injectors to create a life of the structure around it.

The project challenges to reverse the conventional notion of retail in a hyper-mediated urban setting which induces passivity in the consumers, by using the post-consumption objects in our ‘buy and discard’ society, oscillating roles of a consumer to provide radical solutions to move towards ‘circularity’

The project proposes at three scales Repurpose decentralized system which is alternative to the existing waste management system, Repurposing of the Prime mall and Irla street project intervention.The programmatic components include the wall of labour as protagonist intersecting the RCC grid, the apparatuses are devices which have simple machines and mechanisms where a process takes place. A role-player takes part in these apparatuses to perform a task which helps in repurposing. Some of the major programme include the event space which records the reactions of role-players along with the leaderboards, the hall of experiments where the processes converge which then leads on to the labyrinth consumer’s playground where a calmer spacetakes you away from the hyper-real and the noisy street.

Furthermore, the project tries to reframes the role of human in the social and ecological sphere as a shift in the current paradigm for decentralizing ways to manage our objects in our ‘buy and discard’ society.