Burn it Down

UNCOMMON GROUND

Founded as a small gathering in San Francisco in 1986, Burning Man has evolved into a temporary metropolis dedicated to art and community. The annual festival attracts some 70,000 revelers who descend on the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. Initially based on the bonfire ritual of the summer solstice, Burning Man has some strict rules. The annual pilgrimage that resembles religious ritual requires a travel to a far-off place in the desert, 10 guiding social laws intended to catalyze self-actualization and the burning of an effigy. Burning Man is not merely a music festival, not solely an artistic exhibition. It’s not just a place to camp out, get naked, do drugs, and take selfies with strangely-dressed celebrities. It’s a place where consciousness is heightened and where friendships and futures are forged.

They come from all walks of life, ingenious urbanites, resourceful average Joe's, aerospace engineers, architecture students, designers, construction workers. The Black Rock Desert is a large canvas to challenge men and women to create fast and sustainable shelters in any shapes possible. The sheer effort put in by regular people and city slickers to create a unique design to make their neighborhood special -- just for one week is astounding. Much like the Rio carnival designers, camp-builders think and test parts and structures all year long because failure could be catastrophic.

Goods and services can be gifted but not sold or bartered and there are no trash cans on site. A netted fence at the perimeter of the festival keeps windswept debris from escaping into the desert beyond. But when it comes to where to sleep, creativity is encouraged and, in recent years, the festival has garnered press for the weird and wild architecture that inhabits the desert for one week.

The founders invited participants to create interactive rites, ritual processions, elaborate images, shrines, icons, temples, and visions. The theme will occupy the ambiguous ground that lies between reverence and ridicule, faith and belief, the absurd and the stunningly sublime. The human urge to make events, objects, actions, and personalities sacred is protean. It can fix on and inhabit anyone or anything.

The monument, a temple that houses the Burning Man with a Golden Spike erected at the top, “a sculpture that represents the navel of our world".