“We will remain faceless because we refuse the spectacle of celebrity, because we are everyone, because the carnival beckons, because the world is upside down, because we are everywhere. By wearing masks, we show that who we are is not as important as what we want, and what we want is everything for everyone.” David Graeber
David Graeber died in Venice, a city he often visited. After every trip, he brought back Venetian masks and costumes, because he generally admired the Venetian Carnival. Before it became a tourist commodity, the Venice Carnival constituted a political space of radical democracy. During the Carnival, there were no blacks, no whites, no old, no young, no beautiful, no ugly, no poor, no rich. Everyone was a mask. Being a player in the anti-capitalist movements of the nineties and noughties, he knew about the irresistible similarities between the experience of a carnival and an insurrection. It is in this spirit that David Graeber’s friends and comrades are planning a memorial carnival, to be held all over the world. Plans are currently underway for dozens of events including at Zuccotti Park, NY, in Rojava, Korea, and Berlin, in Argentina and on Portobello Road. Paranoia TV is working with Nika Dubrovsky and the memorial carnival’s team to facilitate live coverage of many of these events in a unified video live stream.
International Video Stream
On Sunday, October 11, we came together to mourn and to celebrate the life of David Rolfe Graeber – a teacher, a writer, and a comrade.
As in the Venetian Carnivals, that David loved so much, we were all masks – no matter whether we were young or old, rich or poor, scientists or retired, women or men and what party we belong to. We were all masks, and we were all people, united through death and laughing in its face. From Korea and Australia to Europe and Russia, from New York, London and Brazil, in more than 200 places worldwide, we were all together on that day.
Thanks to our friends from Steirischer Herbst, we organized a 12-hour uninterrupted broadcast, which many people watched. You can download our press kit with photos of Carnival here.
ara | bel | ben | bos-hrv-ser | bul | ces | deu | ell | eus | eng | fas | fin | fra | gle | heb | isl | ita | jpn | kaz | kor | kur | lav | nld | pol | por | rus | slk | spa | tur | ukr | vie | zho
Livestreams
Electron(s) Dance #zoom
Carnival Funeral for David Graeber at Zuccotti Park in NYC
[ event link ]
Zad: Carnaval-Commemoratif Intergalactique
Carnival at the Foundry (Galicia)
Pretending to be someone else is central to any carnival. At the Foundry, we will continue this tradition by reenacting a roundtable with David and others. After this reenactment, there will be time to discuss David’s legacy and all its future echoes, guided by the defiant insistence that another world is possible. (And for drinks, which are also central to any carnival.)
