This document discusses community arts and carnival. It begins by asking what community arts is and why it is needed. It notes that community arts can promote cohesion, health, culture, confidence and more. However, it also raises issues like ensuring diversity and empowering marginalized groups. It discusses how community arts can promote social justice, empowerment, and cultural democracy. The document then examines how these issues apply to a case study of a community arts project in Kamosi. It also discusses carnival's roots in community process and democratic principles. It raises debates around community ownership and cultural resistance versus commercialization. Finally, it considers how carnival relates to principles of community arts and development, and opportunities and challenges for carnival

1. Community Arts and Carnival
Presentation / workshop / discussion
by Kooj (Kuljit) Chuhan

2. What is community arts?
• Examples
• Why do we need community arts?
• Do people not have culture of their own
without the need for this thing?
• Or is community arts also what happens
without some arts worker doing it?
• But since when was that called ‘community
art’?

3. Well, its good isn’t it!!
• Cohesion
• Health
• Culture
• Confidence
• Expression
• Skills
• Education
• … and lots more (including fun!) …

4. Issues
• identity, diversity and a "what it isn't" melting
pot
• "The people have been making art for
centuries, only we don't recognise it because
the people who made it were working class,
or women, or non-European." (Sally Morgan,
'Art With People').

13. Social justice
• - empowerment through participation in
creative process
• - anti-cultural hierarchies
• - belief in co-authorship
• - belief in the creative potential of all sections
of society
• - a possibility of community arts as basis for
equality and cultural democracy.

14. More issues…
• - ignoring wider culture – how does a project
help change our local / national culture?
• - dependency on state-based funding
• - poor development of autonomous
community production
• - dominated by reflective rather than
challenging content (both within discussion
process and end-product).

15. … and:
• Self-determination
• Who gets what money from who?
• Cultural Democracy

16. Case study: Kamosi arts project
• Watch video…

17. wmv

18. Discussion
• How does the Kamosi arts project meet up
with the issues mentioned earlier?
• How do any of the community arts works
that were mentioned earlier meet up with
the issues?

19. Community Development
Community Development is a long–term value based
process which aims to address imbalances in power and
bring about change founded on social justice, equality and
inclusion.
The process enables people to organise and work together
to:
•identify their own needs and aspirations
•take action to exert influence on the decisions which
affect their lives
•improve the quality of their own lives, the communities1
in which they live, and societies of which they are a part.

20. Community Development
The Community Development process is
underpinned by a set of values on which all
practice is based. There are five key values that
underpin all Community Development practice:
•Equality and Anti-discrimination
•Social Justice
•Collective Action
•Community Empowerment
•Working and Learning Together

21. Carnival
• community process
• democratic principles
• history and practice

22. Issues
• Moss Side Carnival – community ownership
• Brazil – empowerment vs sanitisation
• Afro-Brazilian cultural resistance?

23. Issues
“Today Afro-Brazilian culture and history is the
greatest pride Salvador has to offer. But even
that is not unproblematic. Because it happens on
the premises of the tourist and entertainment
industry, and that still is dominated by the white
elite. They sell black culture to those who bid
highest, and without the vast majority of blacks
getting notably richer. But many more of them
are able to articulate their demands, from the
speaker’s platform, in the media, in the corridors
of the powerful, on the internet or – in the
carnival.”

24. Discussion
• How does carnival as a cultural / art form
meet the principles behind community arts
and community development?
• What are the possibilities, challenges, threats,
potentials for carnival in the UK as a form of
cultural community empowerment?