Renegade Burn 2021
Burning Man was canceled again this year because of the pandemic, and I don’t think any of the thousands of people who gathered in the desert expected anything other than a big campout under the stars. Nothing was organized. There were no streets, no fences, no porta-potties, no big artworks, no “Man” to set on fire. In fact, the Bureau of Land Management had imposed a strict fire ban this year. So when we all gathered in a huge circle on Saturday night, it was understood that there wasn’t going to be a show or any fireworks or anything burned to the ground.
But something phenomenal happened. Studio Drift, an artist collective from Holland, mounted a show using drones flying in close formation. The drones — visible only as tiny points of light — rose into the sky and, like a murmuration of starlings, swooped and whirled in dazzling configurations. After a few minutes they went dark. Then they suddenly lit up again in the formation of an enormous man, some 150 feet tall. His arms slowly went up, and he twirled around like a dervish as the crowd went wild.
Shivers rose up my spine and I experienced a euphoric rush unlike anything I’ve felt in a good long time. It wasn’t quite a “burn,” but it had the full effect of one. Powerful medicine — especially after this long and dark year we’ve all lived through.
We don’t know how many people attended Renegade Burn 2021. There was simply no way to get an accurate count. Even if there were, the numbers kept fluctuating as people came and went throughout the week. Some who attended camped miles away from the action, or off-playa. And people showed up from multiple directions, complicating the effort to measure the number of vehicles entering the area from the usual access points.
I’ve been poring over my aerial photos — like the one above — to get some sense of the numbers. As a baseline for comparison, I’ve been using aerial pictures from last year (see photos) when there were 3,500 people on the playa, according to the BLM rangers who were doing their best to keep count. My guess is that there were between 15,000 and 20,000 people on the scene this year. Others say that figure is probably too high. Regardless, it felt massive.
Much has already been written about Renegade Burn. The big question on everyone’s mind is what the success of the gathering will mean for the future of Burning Man. Was it the end of the event as we’ve known it for so many years, or perhaps the beginning of something new and better? For more on this, see for example:
- Burning Man Without the Man by Brian Doherty in Reason magazine. (Brian is a longtime burner and author of This is Burning Man, still perhaps the best book describing the history and unique culture of the event.)
- ‘Free’ Burning Man Brings 15,000 Maskless Partiers, Vax-Only Orgy and Dogs Galore to Nevada Desert by Katie Bain in Billboard
- Plan B Gets an ‘A’ by John Curley in the Burning Man Journal
- Burning Man Goes Rogue…” by Jom Dobson in Forbes
- A Tale of Two Cities by John Cameron in Selector
The last two pieces in the list both feature some of my images.
Click below to view the complete set of photos from the 2021 Renegade Burn