Chapter 7 · 6 years · Animalia · Honorarium art

2023

The Hedgehog Temple

A temple built from anti-tank hedgehogs: the most meaningful thing Kurenivka ever built.

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

Why a memorial

What was there to say?

In the first days of the war the planning horizon was tonight. Then it stretched to a week, then to a month, and finally far enough to imagine going back to Burning Man. But going back after the war meant saying something, and what was there to say? It was all grief. The only thing Kurenivka could honestly bring was a memorial.

That year’s theme was Animalia. The idea came at once: a hedgehog built from anti-tank hedgehogs, the steel crosses that became a symbol of Ukrainian defense, covered in netting like a real one. Yaro applied for a Burning Man Honorarium grant, and in March 2023 learned it had been accepted.

The idea came, Yaro said later, in the autumn of 2022, sitting without electricity in Odesa like the rest of the country. It took a few minutes.

The steel hedgehog was personal. At the start of the war Yaro was working for a construction company in Odesa, and they welded hundreds of them to defend the city. Before the war the same steel channel built houses; then it went to war. More than 700 projects applied for an Honorarium that year, and about 70 were chosen.

The Hedgehog Temple →

The team

Only with Sasha

Yaro made one condition: he would build it only with a strong team. Oleksandr (Sasha) Slobodianiuk said yes at once and became his co-artist; the temple took its final shape largely thanks to him. Dima Pavlenko said yes too, and Mitya Zinoviev’s team welded the frame.

Mitya Zinoviev’s workshop in Kyiv had just built a Ukrainian house at the Vernadsky station in Antarctica. It welded the temple’s frame in fourteen days, almost around the clock. In Sasha’s workshop they cut 80 plywood hedgehogs, indistinguishable from steel ones, and three real anti-tank hedgehogs were borrowed from a checkpoint in Kyiv. They test-assembled everything at home, because in Nevada it would be put together by ordinary people, not riggers, in winds that can tear down anything on the playa.

The temple was dedicated to the Ukrainians who will never make it to Burning Man because the war took them, and alongside it the camp raised money for medical evacuation vehicles for the front.

The camp

Petrykivka in the dust

Around the temple the camp lived its own week. The lounge was lit by light paintings by Marina Malyarenko, Petrykivka flowers glowing on the lamps. Marina and Varvara Logvyn painted anti-tank hedgehogs in the same folk style, one for the camp and one for Center Camp, and on Tuesday Marina taught burners the Petrykivka brushstroke.

The camp stood at 9:45 & F, with its Drunk Cherry Bar and tastings of homemade liqueurs every day from 4 pm. On Monday it opened the week with the United Ukrainians Party; on Tuesday came a Petrykivka workshop and, in the evening, a memorial hour honouring Ukraine’s defenders; on Thursday a Cossack food ceremony. Kurenivka also brought wooden hedgehogs by Andriy Lytvyn, engraved with four words, Volya, Hidnist, Spravedlyvist and Yednist, will and freedom, dignity, justice and unity, and sold them to raise money for an evacuation vehicle.

Back in Kyiv, on 3 and 4 June 2023, Kurenivka Kids Fest brought the same principles to VDNH for children and families: tents, a DJ school, clay, cooking, a disco until ten, and a rule that everyone goes to the shelter when the sirens sound.

The Hedgehog Temple →

After

Thousands of tears

The Hedgehog Temple was meant to be a place where people could cry for Ukraine, and they did. Thousands of tears were shed under it.

Volunteers stood watch at the temple around the clock and spoke with everyone who came. Several thousand people visited during the week, and most of them cried. Relatives and friends had sent the stories of artists, musicians, DJs and other creatives the war had taken. After the burn the temple became the symbol of a fundraiser for evacuation vehicles for the front, together with the Leleka Foundation.

When the burn was over and a crane lowered the temple to the ground, Yaro began to shake, and then to cry like he hadn’t since childhood, as if every tear left there was passing through him. Sasha Slobodianiuk held him: it’s okay.

Art of 2023

The art page

In their words

2023, as people told it

Track of the year

Mamay b2b D1 at Kurenivka, Burning Man 2023.

Built by

The 2023 build crew

The people who arrived first and left last.