Santi's Love and Country County Fair 3 (2026)

Santi’s Love and Country County Fair 3 (2026)

We are so excited and grateful to bring the county fair back for a third year! We are a group of friends and artists that collaborate on a beautiful imagined version of what we think a Valentine’s Day county fair could be. Drawing inspiration from Brazilian Carnaval, the journey from the origins of country music to its influence in the world today,

Anything but Country

When I first began this journey into country music a few years back, it was through parodying songs and a satirical approach to what I thought was the country world. Being a foreigner that came to North America as a young adult, country music was always something that was just out of reach. It felt like an cultural identifier and a separating mechanism. It wasn’t a big deal as nobody seemed to really like country. But as it began making what felt like a resurgence in urban settings, almost as its own subculture, it began to inspire in me something of an entry point into current issues, cultural developments, and my own understanding of my position in the North American and Eurocentric Empires. Country music and its associations with Western culture, pioneering and colonization. into As I began researching country music history, I came across

country music rose from the bottom up.

songs sang to each other after long days of work, played on saturday nights for communities to dance together, from the outsiders and overlooked folks looking to tell their stories.

It’s clear to me that country music, when looked at through a sociological lens, has some functional similarities to Brazilian samba. They are both working-class popular art forms that spread across a country while historically representing the oppressed, the outsider, the marginalized. They are both made by and serve as lyrical storytellings of the lives of people with little political or economic power. They are expressions of survival, community bonding, cultural memory, and resistance to erasure. Both were, and sometimes still are, seen as low-class and dangerous. And they both have been depoliticized and commercialized, removed from their original communities, sanitized, and appropriated for state and corporate hegemony and propaganda.

They also have lots of differences. While Samba performs joy, resilience, Black pride, community strength, and urban belonging, Country espouses masculinity, rural toughness, simplicity, claims to honesty, and morality. This is something that our county fair looks to examine and point at, from an outsider’s point of view. While country historically represented farmers, veterans, workers, migrants, and poor whites, Samba represents Afro-Brazilians, favela residents, and marginalized youth. But in the end, they both create spaces where excluded groups can gather and have a voice.

songs sang to ease through hard times.

The County Fair and Brazilian Carnaval

I am originally from Brasil, and it has always been meaningful to me that Valentine’s often overlaps with Carnaval. Carnaval is a season in Brasil of suspension of normal social life to make place for a sacred play season. The deep and beautifully layered cultural phenomenon that is Carnaval evokes practices that touch on history, politics, spirituality, performance, and collective processing of social norms and practices. It is a form of expression that seeks to make visible and bring to the surface issues, emotions, interactions, and rhythms. Through discipline and community, it is a reclaiming of spaces for joy through inclusivity, classlessness, and transformation, as well us using art, satire, parody, and music to express communal feelings with political connotations. It is an emotional release and resistance of the hardships caused by inequality, instability, violence, and economic stress. It is pure expression and the collective opposition to censorship. We strive to bring all these values to our county fair.

The multicultural influence is key to the unfolding of Santi’s Love and Country County Fair. Under the guise of country music and culture we find an opening to explore the uniqueness and similarities of popular culture from various origins – such as collective dances, .

Hundreds of people have attended our county fair in the last two years that we have put it on. It has been written about in local media and it was named #32 (out of 33) reasons to love Vancouver by Vancouver Magazine. A short documentary about our 2025 version was released by local filmmaker Amanda Bordrup earlier this month.

I can’t express enough how much this show is a labour of love – we are all volunteers that try to put everything that we have and can give into the show. We work so hard to make everything affordable and accessible for anyone to attend. Our hope is that when you are at the fair you will feel a sense of abundance, freedom, and generosity.

The County Fair as a form of Play

The County Fair is an approach towards play as a cultural phenomenon, a way to collectively experience something unique. Play doesn’t have a single function or utility (like exercise, practice, competition, or need for relaxation), nor is it a pathway to another set of emotions. It simply is what you are doing. A voluntary activity with the quality of freedom – we play because we enjoy playing, and in that joy, lies our freedom. It is not a necessary activity or function, only the fact that it is enjoyable makes it a necessity. Play is actions that are different from ‘ordinary’ life, a special form of significant activity, with a social function. The expression of play satisfies all kinds of communal ideas. It stands outside the immediate satisfaction of wants and appetites, indeed it interrupts the appetitive process. It consists of tension, relationships, amusement, and fun.

Play lies outside the reasonableness of practical life; it has nothing to do with necessity or utility, duty or truth. As Johan Huizinga describes it, play transcends the immediate needs of life, imparts meaning to the action, and by the fact that play has meaning, it implies a non-materialistic quality in the nature of the thing itself. We are interested in this non-materialistic quality that emerges from play – not in describing or manufacturing it, but in creating the conditions in which it can emerge and exist. In this way we see play and magic interconnected, related to a richness of experiences and perceptions that go beyond the material and the logical. It’s a sort of knowing, of experiencing, an irrationality that although chaotic and agitated in moments or on the surface level, invites an elevated level of sensitiveness and sensibility to the developing state of play.

We see play as a serious endeavour, understanding that fun is different from funny. The state of mind one is in when play is happening is focused and precise, immersive through action, a performance of the self in a context of relations. In a way, play involves work – something we feel so clearly in the process of creating the County Fair. When our collective meets to discuss and plan elements of the fair, we are in a state of play. We have serious discussions and imaginings of what kind of states will be elicited by our creations, and what could emerge from the interactions with the settings and activities we are creating. We understand, again as Huizinga puts it, that “play lies outside the antithesis of wisdom and folly… of truth and falsehood, good and evil” and that “although it is a non-material activity, it has no moral function” such as vice and virtue.

We believe play has profound aesthetic qualities in its intensity, power, and capacity for absorption, and that it assumes elements of beauty and grace, of rhythm and harmony. A large portion of the efforts we undertake in building up the County Fair from nothing, in transposing the nascent thoughts in our heads into the ballroom floor of The Russian Hall, has to do with creating the ambient where play can happen on the fair grounds. A temporary world within the ordinary world we live in. Sometimes we say that our goal is that if you squint a little, you should feel like you are in a real county fair, a real carnival, outside, in the summer air.

We understand that play can be deferred or suspended at any time – that it is never imposed by physical necessity or moral duty. We found in the county fair format an ideal space for the invitation of play. The booths, the activations, and the performances are all activated by the audience member through a ticket system. There is a clear boundary between play and performance, and the attendee. The choice to engage in play is always theirs, and they have a chance to witness and experience the activations before choosing to engage. We don’t apply to the fair any sense of utility or cultural function like rite or ceremony as those can come with notions of obligation or duty. Play is an expression of being free, it is freedom itself. Like stated above, it is also the idea of stepping out of the real, ordinary life. The absurdism of the booths within the fair format offers us a useful container for the activation of these characteristics of play.

Through play, we think of when we were young creatures who had a hard time keeping their bodies and voices still, how we kept continually moving and making noises for joy, leaping and skipping and dancing and yapping. Play and the play-world, although outside of ordinary life, teaches us something about the current world we live in – including its relativity and fragility, the illusions in which the real world operates. The feelings generated by the fair and its play-world, the exceptional situations it creates, the sharing of important experiences, of mutually withdrawing from the rest of the world, stays with participants beyond the duration of the fair.