By now you have hopefully done your laundry (check), cleaned your tent (check), cleaned your other gear (not yet) and settled back into life at home.  If this was your first year in Black Rock City and you are reading this blog, then you were probably deeply affected by your experience.  Did you learn about yourself, your friends, your community, and creativity?  Many of you are experiencing a post Burning Man malaise as you try to figure out how to integrate your experience with your life at home.  Decompressing can be tough and most of us go through it in some form or another no matter how many years we have been going.  Fortunately, you do not have to go through this alone if you know where to look.

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Burning Man 2009

Once again, the outreach groups of Burning Man (Burners Without Borders, The Black Rock Arts Foundation, Black Rock Solar and The Regional Network) have teamed up to create a unified presence on the playa: District Everywhere! 

District Everywhere is housed under one large pavilion. This year, our interior space will take on the appearance of a large world map, with continents cut out of wood, set up at table height. With the assistance of our Team, guests will create miniature sculptures or flags to represent their off-playa projects and endeavors. Together, the outreach groups will also host interactive activities, art projects, events and gatherings, all geared toward kindling ideas and generating momentum for off-playa, after-Burning Man out reach efforts. Join us for daily BurnSide Chats, hosted lectures, salons and discussions about art, community and culture. Each outreach group will also be hosting cocktail parties and mixers specifically for their group at District Everywhere.  Please visit the Black Rock Arts Foundation any day of the week to learn more about recent projects and future endeavors, and to add to their community-created art installation.  They will be lounging in the shade, sipping lemonade and conspiring to bring interactive art to communities beyond the playa. 

BRAF at Burning Man
Monday, August 30, 2010 – Sunday, September 6, 2010
6:30 and Esplanade
Black Rock City, NV
10:00 am – 6:00 pm 

Burnside Chats
Monday, August 30, 2010 – Saturday, September 4, 2010
1:00 pm – 2:30 pm and 2:30 pm – 4:00 pm

Party Everywhere – opening reception for District Everywhere
Monday, August 30, 2010   5:00 pm – 7:00 pm 

Annual BRAF Playa Cocktail Party
Thursday, September 2, 2010     4:00 pm – 6:00 pm
District Everywhere is located at 6:30 and Esplanade. 

We’d love to see you! 

photo: affinity

When our group got together to start FIGMENT in 2007, we never had any idea that it could ever grow this much, this fast. In 2010, our three-day NYC event had nearly 25,000 participants, and our Boston event, just in its first year, had something like 10,000 participants. It’s really amazing to see how quickly the community around FIGMENT has grown, and it’s exciting to see where it can go next.

Welcome to FIGMENT! (Image (c) 2010 NY_Man)

FIGMENT began in New York in 2007 as a way to bring three important resources together: first, Governors Island, a former Army and then Coast Guard base in New York Harbor that had just been turned over to New York City; second, the creative energy of artists in New York, often creating work without ample resources, often desperately in need of space; and third, the ethos that many of the founders of FIGMENT had learned from Burning Man, expressed in the ten principles—basically, teaching us how to work collaboratively together to make great things happen in a way that is participatory, generous, and free from commoditization.

The idea took off immediately, and, while we expected 500 people or so at our first one-day event, we had over 2,600 people, with thousands more turned away at the ferries. We haven’t stopped since. The New York event has grown exponentially each year, increasing how much art we cram onto the island’s 172 acres, growing in participation as art projects become more ambitious, growing in duration as we add increasingly successful summer-long projects every year, and growing in stability as we build a team that believes in this event and can keep it going.

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