Animalia has been announced as Burning Man’s theme for the 2023 festival.
Burning Man’s team wrote a description of how they are interpreting Animalia to help give inspiration and clarity to attendees.
The theme aims to “celebrate the animal world and our place in it“, and they also explained that animals can be “real and imagined, mythic and remembered“.
This opens the door to some pretty interesting sculpture and costume designs that could range from dragons to a humble house cat. They also gave further explanation to say the 2023 theme also “explore[s] the curious mental constructs that allow us to believe that imagined animals are real, real animals are imagined, and that somehow, despite all evidence to the contrary, mankind is somehow not part of the animal kingdom… So why, then, do so many of us live in a make-believe world where humans are somehow apart from and superior to the rest of the animals in the zoo?”
Also exploring a concept with is “…embracing the fact that we live in a world that is bigger than us, and acknowledging that we are part of a system rather than its masters.”
2023’s Burning Man will run from the 27th of August to 4th of September at its home in the Nevada desert where each year they build a temporary city they call Black Rock City. 2022’s event had over 80,000 people in attendance and each year it gets bigger and better.
You can read Burning Man’s official post announcing the theme HERE.
