Burning Man announces theme for 2017

The annual transformational gathering of Burning Man has announced its theme for 2017 will be 'Radical Ritual', promising an enlightening experience by focusing on the ceremonial aspect.

Each year Burning Man establishes a theme that encompasses the entire event with many creatives developing unique art pieces and installations addressing the concept. 2016’s theme was 'Davinci’s Workshop' while the year before that was 'Carnival of Mirrors'. Now the new theme will look to “reinvent ritual in our post post-modern world”.

Announced via a journal entry on the gathering’s website, the organizers shared what they hope the theme of 'Radical Ritual' will bring: “In 2017, we will invite participants to create interactive rites, ritual processions, elaborate images, shrines, icons, temples, and visions. 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.”

Along with the theme announcement, Burning Man has shared an artist rendering of the center structure (pictured above), which will be engulfed in flames at the end of the gathering. 2017’s monument will be a temple that houses the Burning Man with a Golden Spike erected from the top, “a sculpture that will represent the navel of our world”.

Burning Man 2017 will take place from August 27 to September 4 in Black Rock Desert, Nevada.

Harrison is Mixmag's East Coast Editor. Follow him on Twitter here