These creatures are going about their day. They work hard. They buy things to let others know that. They have flattened their identities into neat, communicable packages. They TAKE CARE OF THEMSELVES. They vote. They are free.

Carnival of the Oppressed is a body of work that wonders what freedom means in a culture where individualism and wealth acquisition masquerade as freedom. If, as Paulo Freire suggests in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the oppressed are denied full humanity, what does it mean to live with varying degrees of oppression in a time of backlash against many forms of civil liberty. A culture defined by work, commerce, high emotional arousal or numbness, glut, scarcity and alienation is inherently oppressive. In this space, are we all non-human? Is it speciesist to even ask that? How would an ant deal with all of this?

Animals have long been used as a site of rebellion. In The Queer Art of Failure, Jack Halberstam analyses early computer-generated cartoons where animals revolt and free themselves from human overlords. This emancipation is also seen in beast fables like Animal Farm, Watership Down, Babe: Pig in the City, and Over the Hedge.

The creatures in Carnival of the Oppressed represent how neoliberalism weaponises identity, turning self-expression into branding and resistance into shame, mental illness, or ban it outright. The result is a culture where we are pushed to perform our humanity efficiently and neatly, while we veer on being cut off from any communal, collective, or radical sense of self.

The materials and processes in Carnival of the Oppressed are deliberately repetitive, overworked and labour-intensive, foregrounding the labour and exhaustion embedded in contemporary culture.

Carnival of the Oppressed features animals living much like we do, and asks the viewer ‘How they might be liberated?’.