Anais Gutierrez
The Burning Man festival goers leave behind oddities. Such as marching band hats, strange goggles and more. These strange items are among those lost at the festival and that expect to be recollected by their owners.
The annual event is USA’s largest outdoor art festival. It’s usually held during the summer. Burning Man 2017 was held from August 27 to September 4.
Lost and soon to be found
You can find almost anything at Burning Man’s collected lost items. From IDs to stuffed animals.
“As of mid-November, we’ve recovered 2,479 items and returned 1,279,” said Terry Schoop. He helps oversee the recovery operation at Burning Man’s San Francisco headquarters.
While lots of items are usually lost at the festival, festival goers are usually responsible. They make sure the items go back to their owners. In fact, Burning Mas has a high return rate.
“We have about a 60 percent return rate,” added Schoop.
Oddities didn’t figure as usually lost items this year. Instead, the usual suspects top this year’s list of most frequently lost in the land of drum circles and psychedelic art cars: 582 cellphones, 570 backpacks or bags, and 529 drivers’ licenses, passports or other forms of identification.
While most of the items end up back to their owners’ hands, unclaimed items are listed on Burning Man’s website with photos and numbers.
“Your item may look different after rolling in the dust,” the website advises.
More than 200 shirts!
They include more than 200 shirts, 100 jackets, 80 hydration backpacks, 50 pairs of eyeglasses, six suitcases and several dozen water bottles.
Having worked on this important part of the festival, Schoop has seen lots of items happily returning to their owners’ hands and remembers some of the most memorable, and weird.
“A partial pair of dentures,” Schoop said.
“The man showed up, took them out of the bag they were in, popped them in his mouth and said, ‘See, I can prove it’s mine: It fits!'”
While some lost items carry hefty price tags, others have more sentimental worth.
Schoop remembers a cellphone returned to a woman who lost it shortly after her father died and her home burned down.
“She said the phone we gave back to her was the only record of any photographs she had of her father and, I think, some voicemails from him,” he said.
“We thought we were just returning a phone, but it meant a lifetime to her.”
The Burning Man
The Burning Man is an annual gathering at Black Rock City. It’s a temporary city erected in the Black Rock Desert of northwest Nevada, attracting over 70,000 participants.
In this location inside the Black Rock Desert, artists have been free to build projects as large and wondrous as imagination and means will allow.
The late summer event is described as an experiment in community and art, influenced by ten main principles: “radical” inclusion, self-reliance, and self-expression, as well as community cooperation, civic responsibility, gifting, decommodification, participation, immediacy, and leaving no trace.
It was first held 31 years ago in 1986 on Baker Beach in San Francisco as a small function organized by Larry Harvey and a group of friends.
Since, it has been held annually, spanning from the last Sunday in August to the first Monday in September.
Landing at the Smithsonian
Over the years, Burning Man has continuously become more and more important. As a sign of its growing influence, the Smithsonian Art Museum will pay tribute to the art of Burning Man in an upcoming major exhibition.
Titled “No Spectators; The Art of Burning Man” will open March 30th, 2018 in the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery in Washington D.C. It’ll run through September 16th, 2018 — ending just a week after the actual festival concludes its week-long run over the Labor Day holiday.
“This exhibition transports the art of Burning Man to a museum setting. Audiences who cannot visit Black Rock City can encounter the cutting-edge work being created at this transformative annual event” said Stephanie Stebich, Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Renwick Gallery.
The exhibition has commissioned the works of over a dozen artists that participate at the desert festival. Among them is Michael Garlington. He was commissioned by the Smithsonian to create an installation, especially for the exhibition.
Garlington is creating a 20-foot archway papered with his own macabre black-and-white photography. The arch will appear to deconstruct into the gallery ceiling.
Garlington has created several 60-foot “photo temples” for the desert festival. Which challenges creators to possess not only hardy doses of creativity and ingenuity but straight-up survivorship in the cruel desert conditions.
“You have this place that allows you to build massive visions of grandeur”. Garlington said as rain tapped rudiments on his shop’s tin roof.
“Burning Man, I owe them everything.”
“They give a palette for people to come build massive cathedrals or temples,” said Garlington.
Source: NBC
