MAS CAMP: Making Dreamers & Goners

Trinidad & Tobago‘s Carnival is a slippery timespace between power and resistance, masquerading in fabric and metal, sequins and mud. In the Mas you are losing yourself - and finding something truer in the echo.  “A life-or-death thing,” as artist Felisha Carénage calls it.

In Mas Camps, costumes for Carnival are conceived, problem-solved and then produced by passionate and often socially precarious persons. These are no ordinary workshops - they are sites of imagination, survival, and skill. This is where someone teaches you how to sew yourself a bargain with history. This is silk screen and wire-bending and wood-bending and tie-dye in play with class mobility, safety and progress. Dreams are stitched, feathered, and wrestled into being, then sweated off, scattered and swept up by Ash Wednesday morning. 

In November 2024, Carénage transformed the Barazani space into such a Mas Camp as part of the Dekoloniale Festival. And now, she returns to Spreeufer 6.

To share with you what the Moko Jumbies have since themselves invoked. Stilt-walkers are divine ghosts, guardians of the in-between. Under their protection, a city is open to mas, laid out to its people. In these islands, including Berlin, we are all dreamers and goners performing death and longing in a gorgeous dance. 

Come see! Come listen.

- Isabel Raabe

And he watched terror strike pale faces as he lunged towards them, and he smiled inwardly as they grinned nervously and rushed hands into their pockets to find coins to offer him in appeasement, as was the tradition. But no. No. He refused the money. He wanted it to be known that he was for real, that you couldn’t just offer him a coin and he would disappear. He wanted them to know that he would always be threatening there, a breath away from them. Some couldn’t understand it, this refusal of the coins. They thought that they were not offering enough; and as he danced before them they made another journey into their pockets and showed him more coins. He didn’t take the money – ‘No, this couldn’t happen! This dragon was crazy! This fellar wanted trouble!’ But it was Carnival. Whoever heard someone calling the police for a Dragon. Aldrick growled and he spat and he moved to press against them, watched them grow more afraid, more confused. He wanted to frighten them. He liked it when they saw him coming and gathered up their children and ran.

Oh, he danced. He danced pretty. He danced to say, ‘You are beautiful, Calvary Hill and John John and Laventille and Shanty Town. Listen to your steelbands how they playing! Look at your children how they dancing! Look at your beads and feathers! Look at the colours of your costumes in the sunshine! Look at your colours! You is people, people. People is you, people!’ He wanted everybody to see him. When they saw him, they had to be blind not to see. They had to be deaf not to hear that people everywhere want to be people, and that they going to be that anyway, even if they have to rip open the guts of the city.

Earl Lovelace, The Dragon Can‘t Dance

A solo presentation at Barazani.berlin by Felisha Carénage, curated by Isabel Raabe. Featuring costumes for a performance commissioned by Dekoloniale Berlin in 2024, as well as recent artworks. The exhibition is accompanied by Private & Public guided tours. 

This project is supported by Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Zusammenhalt, Berlin.

Further support has come from BPA// Berlin Program for Artists, 1000 Mokos and Alice Yard.