carnival and nomadicism

the idea of carnival cannot be separated from nomadic lifestyles. carnival dazzles and disappears—if it stayed sedentary, it would become mundane. carnival, like queerness, exists in the future—a ‘future’ which can only be placed outside any notions of the future we may conceive in the present.

as bakhtin notes, carnival is a rupture in order, a constant movement toward becoming. carnival exposes us to the other, and leaves before we have any time to formulate an opposition. it infects with memory—it operates as an absence. just like we wait for miracles, we await the chaos of carnival to disrupt our mundane lives that are trapped under dense and heavy orders that seemingly exist beyond our control. carnival is the alien whose invasion we await—it’s an invasion of sensibility, a restoration of color in a monochrome world, a destabilization which prevents stasis, and a rebalancing of social tension.

sometimes we find ourselves on the giving end of the spirit of carnival—we don’t just witness it as it arrives for us, but we embody it in some way. we acknowledge our nomadicism, we arrive as the other, we horrify and fascinate, and then we compress our monumental being into a vehicle and transport ourselves to our next sites of intervention. we develop our practice and we are developed by our practice

each site is a lesson for us, not only for our surveyors and voyeurs, but because those we visit are just as alien to us as we are to them. observed and unobserved, self and other, sedentary and nomadic, cease to exist as rigid dualities but as flexible and co-creative modalities. we realize how this collision of worlds that takes place at carnival, is the boundary space, it is the kingdom in the midst from luke 17:21, it is the place where weft and warp create tension and the social fabric is generated—this ritual is a technology and vehicle which will transport us towards worlds we have yet to fabricate.

as we approach escape or exit from our old bolsterings, from aeons we’ve outgrown, we witness our own projections, and the projection of that which is ‘other’, shift, coalesce, and become distorted in the cosmic hall or mirrors. we navigate as sentient and sensing bodies, transitioning, embodying a state of becoming that does not terminate at the bounds of skins, at the limits of flesh, or when confronted with death, but a becoming that is able to rupture past every veil, every illusion, and penetrate beyond, into an otherworldly domain.