carnival for david
carnival ness for david graeber on on david dying 5th anniv (sept 20 2025)
via bsky post [https://bsky.app/profile/davidgraeberinst.bsky.social/post/3lz5g2nfbnk2l]:
The #Carnival4David is taking place on Saturday. If you are in London, come along to celebrate the life of David Graeber.
from dgi site [https://davidgraeber.institute/carnival-for-david-2025/]:
“In Carnival, not only was hierarchy temporarily suspended or reversed, but the whole world was reconstructed as a “Land of Cockaigne,” as the saying went, a domain in which there was nothing but bodies happily partaking of the world and of each other.”
-David Graeber (Manners, deference and private property: or elements for a general theory of hierarchy.)
It’s 5 years since the first carnival celebrating the life of David Graeber. To mark this anniversary it’s time to ‘uncrown and debase’ the self-appointed kings and reimagine our future. This year, we are opening portals to possible futures with LEAP lab at the University of Cambridge. There will be music, dance, loitering, food, fashion shows, and workshops galore.
leap lab et al
SAVE THE DATE
When: on the 20th of September 2025
Where : Rowley Way, London, UKWhat: 1PM-6PM workshops programme here. 7PM carnival procession ending with speeches, clown fights and feasts!
couldn’t find any livestreams happening.. so just adding this tweet from nika dubrovsky (nika on david) [https://x.com/nikadubrovsky/status/1969357902654709901]:
The Book of Leviticus (25:8-13) describes a special year—the jubilee—proclaimed by trumpet sound. In this year they freed slaves, forgave debts, returned land to its owners. It was a ritual of restoring justice and restarting life. In such moments past and present seem to collapse, allowing the community to relive important events anew—the birth of a child, a wedding, gaining freedom.This year marks five years since David Graeber’s death. David was incredibly beautiful, beloved, cheerful, dear, endlessly educated and a brilliant writer who handled language like a coin that always fell on the lucky side for him.
He was kind of a celebrity, but in a very special sense: didn’t build a personal brand, didn’t strive for career, treated his own success with irony. Instead he seriously and intensely created leaderless spaces around himself—spaces where people could be happy and free..t
today we have the means to create that space/conditions globally in sync (detox leap) so we can quit perpetuating the same song.. the whac-a-mole-ing ness of not-us ness
As an anthropologist he studied exactly such communities and described them in his books. David said: we are the product of mutual creation, and society is what we ourselves create and recreate every day. When he died, somehow the David Graeber Institute community formed naturally.
The world in these five years has filled with wars, climate catastrophes and open genocide. But the David Graeber Institute and this Carnival are spaces where Ukrainians and Russians, Jews and Palestinians, Lebanese and Israelis, Brazilians and Americans coexist together. Not because we agree on everything, but because we’re part of one world in which we live together and because this world doesn’t demand unification from us.
I saw how David created the Brain Trust project, gathered collective, ever-expanding meetings where he himself spoke little but wrote a lot, recording what was happening. In some sense Brain Trust was very carnivalesque: anyone could become an equal participant, there was no center, everything constantly changed.
Political parties and demonstrations are important—they try to shift social structures. But they proceed from a utopia of unity, assuming everyone shares the same views. In carnival you can be different, contradictory, unfinished.
Today’s carnival is the fruit of wonderful work by Cambridge’s laboratory (LEAP Lab). I’m more of a participant than organizer here, and I really want the carnival to continue living after I leave England.
May tomorrow the life of each of us be freer than today. And may my life and the life of every Carnival participant tomorrow be freer and happier than today!
We wait and believe in the magic of jubilee!
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via nika fb share [https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10163142798068959&set=a.40039648958]:
This carnival was very important to me: it’s been five years since David left.
The idea of organizing a carnival instead of a traditional funeral appeared in Venice as a despair and hope.
Because Venice, Carnival, Mikhail Bakhtin were all such an important part of David’s world, his whole way of seeing things. It just seemed right to try and keep it alive in all its messiness, collectiveness, joys, but also fears.
Carnival is like a space where laughter and fear live side by side, where life triumphs precisely through admitting its fragility and ambiguity.
More than 250 places around the world joined the first carnival.
People organized large processions – on Portobello Road in London, in Zuccotti Park in New York.
Kurds in Rozhava held mass meetings similar to party meetings. There were also lonely carnivals, like the girl from Tehran who sent us a photo of herself in a mask reading the Book of David.
It is important that Carnivals cannot fail.
Concerts can fail, exhibitions can fail, book presentations can fail.
But the carnival can’t, because everyone is there. He is as he is – complete contradiction, chaos and real life defeating death.
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be you. 