Chapter 4 · 3 years · Burning Man cancelled

2020

The Multiverse

The desert closed. Kurenivka burned the effigy anyway, on the banks of the Dnipro at Kyiv River Rave in Vyshhorod.

The year at a glance. Tap a moment to read its part of the story.

The burn that wasn't

Fire on the Kyiv Sea

In 2020 the pandemic closed the Palace and cancelled Burning Man, which went online that year as the Multiverse. Kurenivka took its fire to the Kyiv Sea instead: a Kurenivka stage at Kyiv River Rave and, on the night of the Burn, an effigy by Oleksii Tronchuk set alight in sync with burners around the world.

It was meant to be the biggest year yet: five large events at the Palace in spring, a Precompression at the end of May, a camp of 150 people in Black Rock City and the most ambitious art in Kurenivka’s history, Merman, which Burning Man had selected for an Honorarium. Instead the effigy burned on 5 September 2020, on the shore, in sync with burners across the virtual universes.

The Palace itself did not survive the year. In April 2020, after eleven months, one of them in lockdown, the community announced that the experiment was over: a space that lived on hugging strangers had no future in a world where you couldn’t. In those eleven months it had hosted Precompressions and Decompressions, Burning Halloween, a Boiler Room, techno raves and exhibitions. Its studios, among them Shytko Art, Bardo, the Kurenivka Artists' Guild and Papaykalab, went looking for new homes, and its things went to storage and auction.

It became a thread through the whole decade. Whatever happened, wherever Kurenivka was, every year something burned.

In their words

2020, as people told it

Track of the year

Mamay for Virtual Burning Man 2020: Multiverse.