Bakhtin: Carnival against Capital, Carnival against Power (2011)
“Carnival is also taken to provide a positive alternative vision. It is not simply a deconstruction of dominant culture, but an alternative way of living based on a pattern of play. It prefigured a humanity constructed otherwise, as a utopia of abundance and freedom. It eliminated barriers among people created by hierarchies, replacing it with a vision of mutual cooperation and equality. Individuals are also subsumed into a kind of lived collective body which is constantly renewed.” —Andrew Robinson, Ceasefire Magazine
Rewilding the Human Spirit in the Age of Moral Colonialism (2025, an article Jason Hoffman shared with our reading group)
“It takes courage to resist this moral colonialism, to rewild the human spirit with the insistence that life, allowed its full aliveness, is not a symposium of self-righteousness but a festival of wonder, not a military parade of masses marching behind generals uniformed in the moral fashions of the day but a carnival of felicitous participancy on equal terms — people of all kinds, each costumed in some choice expression of their light, together constellating a collaborative cosmos of belonging to something both transient and transcendent.” —Maria Popova, The Marginalian
Constant Carnival at Katonah Museum of Art (2022, an exhibition I saw in Upstate New York)
“In medieval Europe, the festival of Carnival—like modern day Mardi Gras—was a time of liberation and inversion. Carnival leveled social hierarchies, encouraged free expression, and celebrated behaviors that were usually prohibited. Although the Carnival tradition eventually went into decline, its transgressive spirit survives in artworks that use humor or grotesquery to challenge social norms and destabilize power structures.”
The Collective Body (2021, this one relates to Yugoslavia)
“In order to speak of a society, there must be a prevailing sense of comradeship and mutual solidarity among people. Otherwise, we can only speak of private interests. People are social beings, and today, when we spend most of our time isolated in our homes, what we miss most of all is the touch and immediate closeness of others. But our isolation is being preyed upon by those who want to make money off us, who exploit our pain to bolster their power.” —Zdenka Badovinac, e-flux Journal