Callaloo is a soup that is made from various ingredients in an unlikely combination of everything from dasheen leaves and okra to coconut milk and crab. It is said to be the most delicious dish in the Caribbean: a delicacy created from a hotchpotch of tastes and smells. This amalgam of extremely diverse ingredients is a symbol for both the Caribbean culture and its Carnival – that festive parade of different cultural traditions and forms of expression that so many people look forward to each year.

The Caribbean Carnival creates a bridge between artistic disciplines, between people of different cultures and between social classes and religious traditions. It exerts an indelible influence on interculturalism and artistic development, and can serve as an example for many multicultural societies. All the more reason for the Prince Claus Fund to give the Principal Award to outstanding examples of this Caribbean tradition and to select Carnival in general as this year’s central theme.

The interest of the Prince Claus Fund in the theme of Carnival was inspired by the essential characteristics of Carnival festivities; the breaking of boundaries, the bridging of cultures and the spaces of freedom that are created. As Russian expert on Carnival Mikhail Bakhtin stated in 1929, ‘Carnival brings together, unifies, weds and combines the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid’. Carnival provides a space of freedom where fusion, mixing and melting can take place. Where the garbage man can dance with the director and the go-go girl with the president.

Music in relation to Carnival is presented extensively in the Journal because it carries all the characteristics of this fusion festival. Drupatee Ramgoonai crossed racial borders of being a Trinidadian of Indian descent who dared to sing Carnival songs, an African tradition regarded as the preserve of blacks-from-the slavery-period. She developed chutney soca, a breakthrough in Carnival music that used to be dominated by Calypso. ‘Indian soca, sounding sweeter … Rhythm from Africa and India / Blend together in a perfect mixture,’ she sings. Music expert Simon Lee explains all the musical fusions and mixtures. And before you finish reading his essay ‘Wood, Skin and Steel’, you are overwhelmed by the richness of the musical traditions related to Carnival in the Caribbean alone.

The light musical films of Brazilian chanchadas from the Thirties were initially a vehicle for popular Carnival songs, which people hummed and sang with the projection of the film. Later they became carriers of Brazilian identity vis-à-vis American globalism, and gave an optimism and confidence to the Brazilian people. The visual essays of the Journal tell their own stories. Grabs from the film Territories (1984) of artist Isaac Julien shows the troubled and intense Notting Hill Carnival where people mix but violence emerges. Territories gave testimony to that in the Eighties when racial violence was at its height in London. That police officers can be bored with joy happens in Rotterdam. The chair of the Summer Carnival Foundation, the Principal 2001 Prince Claus Award laureate, describes the festivities, and the photographs of Bas Czerwinski document the joyous Dutch counterpart of Notting Hill, an example for any multicultural activity in the world.

Carnival was heavily influenced by the traditions of slaves and displaced peoples in the Caribbean and Latin America, and has been brought back to Africa by the 1998 Prince Claus laureate Oumou Sy who organises the Dakar Carnival in Senegal. Photographer Mamadou Touré Béhan captures this historic exchange. The impressive visual forms of and the ideas behind the work of Peter Minshall, the 2001 Principal laureate from Trinidad, are revealed in an interview with this multi-talented artist. It is for a good reason Minshall named his company Callaloo. Innovation through mixing is the essence of his work. Minshall was fascinated as a young boy by the masquerade and the dressing-up during Carnival. He gave new forms to the changes of identities. Men became women, people animals. All transformed into living artworks. High art was thrown onto the streets. As Carnival should, he turned everything upside down in the representation of form and colour, and he still does.

Photographer Catrien Ariëns takes us through delightfully sensitive pictures of the Carnival preparations from Curaçao, an island in the Dutch Antilles. These images reflect her research into Curaçao society and the role of the festivities in this small but lively island. In contrast, the largest Carnival in the world is the four-day long festival in Rio de Janeiro. Here, Ineke Holtwijk examines the flurry of plastic surgery on upper-class women’s bodies before the parades and the all-night dancing.

Concepts, ideas and thoughts of the most respected Carnival experts worldwide contribute to this Journal; Mikhail Bakhtin and Roberto DaMatta are quoted. And the work on Carnival of two Caribbean laureates of the Noble Prize and the Prince Claus Award is published; ‘Mass Man’, a poem by Derek Walcott, and an extract from the novel Solibo Magnifique by Patrick Chamoiseau examine Carnival from the insider’s perspective.

Carnival tastes as good as callaloo. It is a great multicultural party and a fusion feast, a space of freedom and a cultural bridge which we all can cross both ways.