As I am an adventurous person, in 2013 I couldn’t say no to the invitation of going to a festival I didn’t know anything about. The entrance ticket, which by the way costs $ 380, was a gift for my birthday from a dear friend, who was going to be my party companion.
After a long flight to San Francisco, then a Greyhound bus to Reno, I got picked-up by my friend’s car, which took me by surprise because was overloaded with the following:
100 litres of water, 70 cans of Mexican cheap beer, non perishable food and a lot of wet wipes.
I asked my friend: “Wet wipes?’.
And she smiled and answered: “You don’t know where we are going, don’t you?”.
We were going to Burning Man.
A little bit of history:
Burning Man Festival, one of the most fascinating and least understood phenomena of our time, was created by a group of friends living in San Francisco, in 1986, as a week-long experiment in a temporary community dedicated to radical self-expressions, art and anti-consumerism.
The name is taken from the culmination of the event when a large wooden effigy called “the Man” is being burned, as the symbolic ritual of being your own master, thinking outside of the box, being creative, courageous and guided in life only by your own ideas and thoughts.
The event is influenced by ten principles: radical inclusion, self-reliance, communal effort, civic responsibility, decommodification, gifting, participation, artistic self expressions, immediacy and leaving no trace.
Therefore, every last Sunday of August, thousand of people gather to build and take part of the so called Black Rock City, on a flat, lifeless, dusty, alkaline land, with no water, electricity or cellphone signal, at the heart of the Black Rock Desert, 190 Km north of Reno, Nevada state, USA.
In the eyes of a “Virgin”:
As I was waiting in the cars line, through the dust storms, to enter Black Rock City, I had to follow the “Virgin Burner”’s ritual, meaning to lay on the ground, and make sand angels, then to ring a bell. Suddenly, I realized why my friend bought so many wet wipes!
The city that was going to be built, if you can imagine, was organized in a big circle: 65,000 people parked their caravans on its smaller concentric circles that were named after the alphabet, and on its rays, that were located every 15 minutes corresponding to the forward movement of the clock.
It was dark outside when the Romanian flag and tent were placed randomly. Only the next morning we found out that our address was going to be 8:00 with J.
As you get through life, it’s harder to think that something or a situation might still scare you, but trust me that this festival took me by surprise and mentally, I accepted the reality around me and I got used to the atmosphere of the place, only two days after I got there.
As money have no value in The Black Rock City, and leaving gifts and the barter are the only means of transaction, I soon received a baby pink fake-furred bicycle. Every burner has a colorful bicycle that gets lighted at night.
Long story short, the participants who all have a nickname (mine was Sparkle), are the most friendly people I met, they express themselves artistically, wear the cloths that represent them or don’t wear anything at all, dance, laugh and love, drink what they brought from home, share everything and give. For one week, they choose to be only happy and to be who they always felt or wanted to be, without the repressions of the real world.
There is unconventional architecture everywhere, a temple where you can gather your thoughts and pray, relaxing areas such as The Enchanted Forrest, designed in a way that you cannot imagine, art cars or The Mutant Vehicles whose beauty cannot be captured not even in pictures, places for roller skating or playing all sort of games, and I can go on forever.
Burning Man is a playground for adults: an environment built by the same sense of childlike wonder, but with the adult knowledge, skills and resources. The biggest crowd of naked PHD graduates I’ve ever seen.
Sadly, the last Saturday of the event, every piece of wooden art gets burned together with The Man, the symbol of the festival. The entire city is a continuously and lively party until the last day, when every burner comes out of this fantasy world, with no trace left behind.
Burning Man is difficult to describe. It looks like a Mad Max movie, but it feels like home in a dream world. You have to experience it, so you can understand it. And even then, there is no guarantee you will.
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