Unknown Pleasures

“People often tend to misrecognise as ‘natural’ the settings that have been deliberately set aside for human recreation and contemplation. These spaces include the parks and reserves where an ill-defined and unspecified ‘nature’ has been converted into cultural experience and spiritual commodity. It is the metropolitan space of the western worlds zoological gardens, however, that people encounter a nature that has been most complexly and culturally contrived by, and for, humans. Inside the grounds of these zoological gardens, an illusion of Nature is created from scratch and re-presented back to human audiences in a cultural performance and achievement…”