Rūta Mažeikienė (PDF)
https://doi.org/10.53631/MIS/2025.17.9
This article explores the contemporary urban carnival as a participatory art practice that engages local communities. The object of analysis is the Fluxus Festival carnival, held annually in Kaunas since 2018 as a community-based event inspired by the ideas and aesthetics of the Fluxus movement. The research is grounded in Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of carnival as well as in key concepts of participatory art developed by François Matarasso and Claire Bishop. Using a qualitative case study approach, the article investigates whether the contemporary carnival can serve as an effective form of participatory art that fosters community involvement through collective creativity. The findings reveal that the Fluxus Festival carnival operates as a practice of collective artistic expression, in which playfulness, creative freedom, and social interaction intertwine – thus endowing the contemporary carnival with new social functions and highlighting its potential as a meaningful, community-engaging form of participatory art.
Keywords: contemporary carnival, participatory art, collective creativity, community engagement, Fluxus