(2023/work in progress)

Parisian parks can be seen as modern attempts to recreate an Edenic utopia—an idealized, curated version of nature that reflects humanity’s longing for harmony, beauty, and escape from the chaos of urban life. Yet their artificiality and layered symbolism expose the fragility and contradictions at the heart of these recreations.

The Park presents itself as a space of controlled enjoyment, where nature is tamed and ordered. Yet its very existence betrays a deeper anxiety: the impossibility of returning to a true state of nature. From a psychoanalytic perspective, the Park functions as a symbolic structure mediating desire. It is a liminal space where the subject temporarily suspends the demands of the urban superego and indulges in a fantasy of return to the maternal embrace of nature. But this fantasy is always already ruptured. The meticulously arranged landscapes, manicured lawns, and planned vistas serve not to restore Eden, but to mask the abyss beneath—the Dark Matter that threatens to erupt and dissolve the illusion.

The Park is both familiar and alien—a comforting imitation of nature that simultaneously reveals its artifice. When celebrated as symbols of cultural achievement, parks easily veer into kitsch: representations of idealized nature or civic virtue, severed from any profound or unmediated experience. Yet precisely in their failure to sustain the illusion of harmony, they expose the traumatic excess that the Symbolic order—the logic of our sanity—cannot contain.