Carnival Land: A Creative Consideration of Sequential Storytelling to Discuss Cultural Dislocation

Abstract

This article will outline the practice-led research project Carnival Land, a picture book that weaves together sequential storytelling and illustration to discuss cultural dislocation. Based on the researcher’s experiences as an immigrant from Brazil to New Zealand, it provides a narrative in metaphors and a creative orchestration of photomontage, bilinguality, and theatricised multi-page spreads. The story tells of the trials and eventual transformation of a young girl in a foreign land, where aspirations appear as costumes in an annual Carnival parade. Several theoretical frameworks significantly influenced Carnival Land. These were notions of transgression, carnality, and Carnival (Bakhtin, 1968); structure and discourse surrounding bricolage (Strauss, 1962); and writings relating to journey both as a rite of passage (Gennep, 1960; Turner, 1979); and as a process of immigration. Methodologically, the project emanates from an artistic research paradigm (Klein, 2010) that supports a heuristic approach (Douglass & Moustakas, 1985) to the discovery and refinement of ideas. The project employed autoethnography as a research design intended to facilitate the strategic accessing of personal experience and synthesised it into a fictional work. Thus, the research draws upon both tacit and explicit knowledge in developing the narrative, its structure, and stylistic treatments.