The Museum of Care, a project of the David Graeber Institute, began right after Carnival4David in the wake of his untimely death. The Memorial Carnival4David, which is the founding project of the Museum of Care (and, in turn, the David Graeber Institute), was set up to celebrate David’s life. Since then, carnival has been a recurring topic of the DGI and the Museum of Care’s open educational platform.
This summer Carnival will be one of the central topics of the Discussion circles – a series of events facilitated by the David Graeber Institute in the St Vincent and the Grenadines. We will discuss Carnival as an integrated project, fundamental to almost every human culture with its own unique economic, political, and artistic elements. We hope that the research, co-creation and participation in the actual Carnival will become the basis for collaboration between the Institute and the people of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. The long-teem plan is to research Carnival as a multidisciplinary project that can combine a human economy (of life on an island) with art and anthropology studies.
Nika Dubrovsky, founder of Museum of Care and curator of Carnival4David room and project:
I think of Carnival as a total art installation, gesamtkunstwerk, that includes costume design, music, set design, storytelling, education, and the day-to-day life organization. It could be a really good project for combining the efforts between the David Graeber Institute and our academic partners. .
In this future collaboration we, from the side of the David Graeber Institute, we will curate artist’s participation, local and international as faculty members for this class. We’re also looking for involvement of anthropologists, especially interested in Mikhail Bakhtin, and his theory of Carnival, and other academics and researchers. We are going to include research possibilities based on some of David’s Notebooks and his writings about Carnival in Madagascar and North America, as well as notebooks from Madagascar that we were working on in DGI.
Make sure to follow Museum on Care and David Graeber Institute on social media to get the updates on all our news and events! We will make an announcement about the new development of Carnival project soon!
