Preserving Carnival: Report from the Carnival Conference

Preserving Carnival

York University and Dr. Christopher Innes, the Canada Research Chair in Performance and Culture, recently hosted the international conference “Carnival, ‘A People’s Art’, and ‘Taking Back the Streets’”. As chair of the “Preserving Carnival” panel I had the opportunity to meet with a small group of international scholars and archivists to discuss preservation methods, strategies and challenges relating to carnival.

Among the presenters was Eithne Nightingale of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, England. In her presentation, entitled “Breaking the Mould: Carnival at the V & A 2000-2008,” Nightingale advanced a collaborative strategy for a “more inclusive and diverse museum.” While the V&A is primarily a bricks and mortar museum, many of her recommendations resonated with Artmob’s digital archiving and online collection-building objectives.

The challenge is how to go about documenting and preserving “carnival.” Regardless of which specific carnival one has in mind – Toronto’s Caribana, England’s Notting Hill Carnival, Rio – the task of preservation is a paradoxical one. Carnival is improvisational, rhythmic, and dynamic. Carnival is a multimedia cultural expression, incorporating music, dance, costume, and more. Carnival is live and mobile, winding through the streets in a continuous reconfiguration of performer, performance and audience, and the boundaries between these categories are constantly blurred. Museums, archives and libraries, on the other hand, are relatively immobile, and lifeless, the cultural materials locked down for preservation, subjected to taxonomies for cataloguing, acquisition and accession policies, copyright and other intellectual property regulations, and attenuated by the sheer need to subject the richness of carnival to a curatorial selection process.

The Victoria & Albert’s approach to addressing some of these issues has been extraordinarily rich. They advocate documenting the event itself through video, gathering artifacts such as press clippings, photos and other promotional materials, collecting objects such as costumes and original creative works including recordings and scores, preserving administrative documents, biographical material. Nightingale extends the strategy in creative and arguably unexpected ways, including oral histories, a “proactive documentation” approach to preserving intangible heritage, and even, in the case of the 2003 Notting Hill Carnival, setting up a makeshift studio in the streets for photographing carnival goers as part of the cultural record.

If the archival project and its collaborators manage to negotiate the curatorial thicket of carnival in a manner acceptable to all parties, there is still the monolithic problem of intellectual property, and the tangle of potential rights holders at play. Dancers, musicians, costume designers, float designers, audience, sponsors and their logos: whose permission must be secured in order to make the artifacts of the carnival available for research and study online? As Blake Taylor of the University of Winnipeg pointed out, videotaping carnival for study is fraught with difficult questions of this nature, and no clear or uniform answers seem at hand.

Amid the navigational perils of engaging the intersections of carnival, archives, and intellectual property, Nightingale offered some suggestions for what a ‘carnival’ archive should be, and what role a museum should play in the process. Some of her recommendations were that a carnival archive should:

• Be by the community for the community
• Give credit where it is due
• Be a dynamic, interactive, multi-media
• Be easy to use
• Develop skills and open up opportunities for carnival communities

It is worthwhile addressing each of these recommendations in relation to the arts content management software being developed by Artmob.

This software is designed to enable non-technical communities to develop their own online digital collections and archives in a manner that fits their mandate and character, without relying heavily on external organizations to mediate the online identity. Based on the Drupal CMS, Artmob is easy to use, and creating new pages and entries can be managed by a wide range of individuals with varied knowledge of Web technologies. In this way, it is hoped that rather than be driven by a top-down, gatekeeper approach to curating and contextualizing cultural resources, projects may empower participants and artists in the entire process of selecting, digitizing, and publishing works.

Providing accurate and thorough attribution is a key area of research and development for Artmob. Our project is expanding and enriching Drupal modules for noting contributor details in order to enhance the appearance of contributor information as well as increase the flexibility of roles and their relevance to a variety of cultural fields.

Drupal CMS supports a variety of multimedia formats, for audio, video, images, file attachments, illustrations, and more. By developing from a Drupal CMS base, Artmob ensures the ability of organizations to create an engaging, interactive, dynamic, and ever-expanding online presence.

The process of designing, developing, digitizing, and curating digital archives represents a powerful and practical opportunity for digital skills acquisition. Users are not merely acquiring skills specific to a cultural field, or to an individual arts organization, but relevant to any number of cultural or private sector initiatives deploying comparable content management systems. Furthermore, these skills and projects are still in their infancy as far too many cultural organizations and institutions still have limited online presences, or none at all.

I wish to thank the presenters and participants for an engaging and thought-provoking session on preserving carnival.