'Design for a Carnival'
House 1: ants organise sequins
House 2: lace making for vinyl
House 3: tree smash/fix
DVD
6 minutes

'Design for a Carnival', 2003, is an evolving project. It exists as a series of videos, re-mixed music, billboard projects, drawings, large scale public art works and small ephemeral events which collectively propose an entirely new form of festival - a model for a community to engage with each other in a way which is full of play and disorder, free from commerce, words, reason, and fixed hierarchies or identities. But this is a community which is fragmented - its identity apparently rooted in the 'local' yet networked internationally as the carnival migrates across a number of spaces and times:
Lace-making catalyses a new method of DJ-ing; A large billboard sign in Turin announces a meeting in a Hotel bar in Haiti; Local teenagers destroy and carefully reconstruct a woodland sapling; Ants prepare a constellation of sparkling sequins on their ant hill; Baseball caps are burned on flaming pyres; A collaboration with fashion designer Jonathon Saunders, will see a colossal dress specially tailored to 'garland' an 80ft high wind turbine. Clothes are swapped between countries and micro-parades are mapped out to vaccilate between places 100's of miles apart. To document the carnival an elaborate structure made of bones and telephone cable is created as a camera filter, the resulting images acting as a mask for its audience and subject. Together, the outline of an event is being suggested, a tentative sketch, ambiguous, dark, excessive and joyful, far from the safety of the contemporary, commodified, urban street festival. But is everything Chodzko shows us in Design for a Carnival preparation for the carnival's future existence? Or is what we see the carnival itself; a carnival of preparation, of allusions and ideas, taking place here in the gallery itself?