Finale Festival di Tumba

Finale Festival di Tumba

30 January 2026

It is still only morning. But after midday, things will become hectic: some 10,000 people will have to find their way to the Festival Center, while the rest will follow it somewhere on a screen.

Festival di Tumba is no longer self-evidently a people’s celebration. It has increasingly become a product.

I will return a few more times to this year’s carnival, because it reflects where we stand as a society.

Back to the festival. If you, like me, do not pay for television, chances are you have not heard a single tumba this year. Tonight, you will probably have to settle for a very basic television broadcast.

And that is exactly where the problem lies. This is the result of the neoliberal mindset that gained more and more ground in the 1990s: culture became a market, experience became access, and access came with a price tag. Carnival, with its tumba, was no longer a people’s celebration, but a commercial enterprise.

Those who do not pay are left on the margins — or outside altogether.

What makes it worse is that even if you pay, you may not get real value or quality for your money. After more than 50 years, the festival still cannot start and end on time. It has almost become part of the festival’s identity: chaos as tradition.

Times have changed, of course. Musically, you increasingly hear people say they cannot even name the winners of the past ten years — let alone recall the compositions. That says something. Not only about music, but about culture itself: it no longer sticks.

The lifespan of a tumba is now just one evening — the evening it is performed. Because even during the carnival parade, you hardly hear it again. Tumba has shifted from a season to a moment: a consumer item, not a collective memory.

Yet those who do not know any better still experience it as a wonderful celebration.

And perhaps that is the most confronting part: that we have become accustomed to less and started treating it as normal.

And let us not forget: this is also a country that will be participating in the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

Miguel Goede