BY: VICTOR HABCHY
Imagine standing in the 107-degree heat of Black Rock City as moisture begins to drip off your body like a melting candle. You see the silhouette of a woman twirling a rainbow parasol under a veil of dust. You hop on your five-wheeled bike and ride into the expanse of nothingness.
About 110 miles north of Reno on a remote and dry lake known as Black Rock Desert over 60,000 people, known as “Burners”, gather into a temporary city where no separation between art-space and living space exists. At Burning Man there are no spectators, many are there to create art yet they themselves also become part of it. Each individual brings his or her own neon benevolence, along with ideas that are far from ordinary. Imagine a car that looks like a shark’s fin, a woman dressed in a suit made of silver mirrors, and a 105-foot wicker man burning in the centre of a human circle.
If you could create a temporary society, where would your imagination take you? At Burning Man they have 10 simple rules that are nothing short of Utopian:
- Radical inclusion
- Gifting
- De-commodification
- Radical self-reliance
- Radical self-expression
- Communal effort
- Civic responsibility
- Leaving no trace
- Participation
- Immediacy.
The vivid images of Victor Habchy dance in our brain, allowing the viewer to witness the evolution of new-wave artistic civilization in its infancy. In these images, Burning Man is nothing short of an eccentric epiphany. It is primal, where every individual’s uniqueness is nothing short of a miracle.
