During Feral festival 2024, the panel "Who Can Change Carnival?" brought together different collectives and practicioners of carnival rituals. Carnival became our lens through which to question our relationship with tradition and legitimacy. Is it an act of reclaiming public space? How can we (re)claim its traditions while emancipating ourselves from a patriarchal and colonial regime? From the perspective of the right of access to the city, how can we “invent our own costumes, our own songs, inhabit our own territories?". This round table discussion, that took place the first afternoon of the festival, highlights the counterculture represented by independent and "wild" or autonomous carnivals, counter-carnivals that seek to escape the cultural and touristic industry. A moment of transgression of rules and hierarchies, Carnival pushes us to question the normativity of bodies in public space and to unfold what we want to create during this cycle of invention, construction, and destruction. What practices do we want to overturn and burn? What kind of collective organisation do we need in order to disseminate and perpetuate these experiences of struggle, endurance, and resistance?

Published in part in Feral Magazine n°3, "Rituals for the city and its fringes" (page 28), the panel is transcribed here in its entirety.