Burning Man Returns With a “Radical Ritual” Theme in 2017

“Beyond the dogmas, creeds, and metaphysical ideas of religion, there is immediate experience. It is from this primal world that living faith arises.” While attendees of the annual Burning Man festivities in the Nevada desert often speak of it as a spiritual experience, next year the link will be a little more explicit with the announcement of the “Radical Ritual” theme.

“In 2017, we will invite participants to create interactive rites, ritual processions, elaborate images, shrines, icons, temples, and visions,” organizers confirmed yesterday in a statement.

“Our theme will occupy the ambiguous ground that lies between reverence and ridicule, faith and belief, the absurd and the stunningly sublime. The human urge to make events, objects, actions and personalities sacred is protean. It can fix on and inhabit anyone or anything. This year, our art theme will release this spirit in the Black Rock Desert.”

The organizers describe the theme as an attempt to reinvent ritual in our postmodern world, though this time free from either belief or religion, with the focus purely on what we take away from the experience of the ritual itself, without any additional baggage.

Find out more at the Burning Man Journal. To relive this year’s event, check these shots from Andrew Jorgensen on behalf of Confluence; you can view them in full over at our Burning Man 2016 gallery.