(Initial Stage: Trial and Error)
First there was #Carnival4David.
After the Carnival4David, Nika convened people to talk about the next steps: to try to put into practice one of the imaginary projects of David and hers, which they described in several essays and called “The Museum of Care.”
In an attempt to repeat the same practice that worked well during Carnival4David, a group of people interested in developing the project and make decisions and solve problems together came to work on building the Museum of Care. A Core Group of about 10 people was created. However, there were two radical differences between the Carnival and the Core group of the Future Museum of Care: 1) Temporality: — The Carnival group was united around a specific and final project. As soon as the project was successfully completed, the Group dissolved itself. David often said that assemblies gathered to solve specific problems: to stage protests, demonstrations, revolutions, and/or carnivals.
Contrarily to the Carnival group, the Museum of Care group appointed itself as the governing body of a future institution that should potentially exist forever.
2) The Carnival group was already familiar with each other. The Museum of Care’s members mostly never sow each other. It was a new community.
So, the two groups behaved differently.
The Carnival’s organizers did not have any restrictive functions. First, there was no time for it, and secondly, why? If someone made a stupid or unfortunate Carnival, we simply wouldn’t pay any attention to it! There were 250 carnivals all over the world—more than were possible to check out.
Immediately after the advent of the Museum, questions arose as to how to oversee and be responsible for the residences that began to be offered for Museum management, how to control the projects that were offered to the Museum, and, most importantly, how to adopt the rules by which the Museum would operate?
This led to long conversations about what to allow and what to ban. Whoever had more time to sit online and figure things out always won, because you had to get everyone to agree, and that was a long process. Behind-the-scenes diplomacy started.
Another distinction between Carnival and the Museum is that while the Carnival members were focused on specifics for a common cause. In opposite, the members of the Museum were detached from solving concrete problems.
The site of the new MoC was never made, and the current version (as of January 29, 2021) is still a work in progress. All the work was done by a small affinity group of people who knew each other well. Only a few people contributed in any case.
