Carnival Union (CU) is an artistic collaborative project between Hanan Benammar, Gidsken Braadlie, Camilla Dahl, Marius von der Fehr, Lisa Pacini, Pia Maria Roll and Venke Aure. The group has backgrounds in visual arts, performance, theory, performing arts, sound art and activism.
CU is based on an understanding of creativity, play and artistic practice as revolutionary tools for creating new fellowships, new language and new ideas about a possible future. We conjoin our artistic freedom with the idea of a possible freedom for all. With CU, we want to challenge ourselves, our fellow artists and our communities with experiments, collaborations and shared ownership. Our first project will be a collaboration between a number of artists, artists groups, musicians, dancers and theorists, as well as school classes, educators, activists, kindergartens, immigrant organizations, refugees and youth clubs in “KARNEVALET”.
“KARNEVALET” is a project that includes about 20 artists and a number of participants of different ages. The artists will, in collaboration with the participants, develop workshops for creating objects, musics, situations or movements, which will be the starting point for a large carnival parade in the streets of Oslo in March 2019. During the workshops, participants will explore creativity as a practice, a value and as a political force. The outcomes of the workshops will be used in the carnival parade where everyone involved will move through the city to carry, hold or wear the things they have made and perform various actions that they have worked with. The parade will start with a carnival appeal at Vaterlandsbrua in Grønland, and then move through the city in a transformational circle, in the spirit of the carnival, including the parliament, to end back at Vaterlandsbrua.