The expressive capacities of decay in Cabo Verde’s Carnaval Soncent. A case study of the ‘Hired to Farm’ allegorical car

Abstract

Carnaval Soncent is a festival held on the island of São Vicente in Cabo Verde, located approximately five hundred kilometers off the west coast of Africa. Central to Carnaval Soncent are the allegorical cars (referred to as parade floats outside of Cabo Verde) that come into being through informal craft processes. Significantly, the designers and makers embrace, even welcome, the material demise of these larger-than-life artefacts that they so painstakingly construct. This paper considers how this embrace of the material vulnerability of the artefact – its decay – forms an essential part of its expressive capacity. Using the notions of ‘conceptual compression’ (Fauconnier, Turner 2003) and ‘performance characteristics’ (Skibo, Schiffer 2008) I analyse the ‘Hired to Farm’ allegorical car, from the 2017 edition of Carnaval Soncent, to illustrate how it functions as a visualised memory. The analysis suggests that, during its composition, the allegorical car’s conceptual content becomes entangled with its materiality, creating a meaningful tension that facilitates the eventual de-composition, or release, of its emotionally charged content. This release detangles the content
and materials to, once again, make them available for the re-making of shared experiences, memories, and the community.

Keywords: decay, carnival, Cabo Verde, artefact as process, collective effort, circular economy, conceptual compression