It’s summertime and Burning Man is approaching shortly. Unlike most years for the past decade, I will not be attending this year’s festival of acid and sunshine in the Nevada desert. But I remain fascinated, fixated upon its circumstances and its fashions.
Today’s post is about the European Burning Man, called “Nowhere.” It occurs annually in Spain for the last five years or so. One of my best friends, Ruby May, is one of the organizing forces behind nowhere and herein lies our short interview.
Ruby
Ruby: Well, until this year (as Nowhere just celebrated it’s 6th year) it was basically just our friends and friends of friends… we are a group of burners from Europe, the hub of which live in U.K but also includes France, Italy, Norway, Switzerland and Spain amongst others and our ages range mostly from early twenties to mid thirties.
Seeing as to get to Burning Man and cross the Atlantic you have to have a certain degree of dough, I’d say the vast majority of us are professionals with o.k incomes however as Nowhere grows (we crossed the 500 mark this year), our diversity naturally grows… this year we had 2 babies, 2 teenagers, several grandparents and a wandering x-priest we adopted. I’d say the vast majority are there because they are attracted to the ethos of the event which rests on the same principles as Burning Man i.e radical self expression, self-reliance, leave no trace etc, there’s definitely fewer or any ‘tourists’ and to be honest I’d say the people there are more into the partying aspects rather than other aspects of Burner culture that might attract people like healing, education etc.
Nowhere 2009
How about fashion? Is the overall style different at Nowhere compared to its american counterpart? After seven years at Burning Man, I am so fucking tired of cowboy hats, pink wigs, funky sunglasses and furry boots that I could kill someone. I need to know if this tradition has supplanted itself o’er the pond, or if you guys are doing something different and cool.
Yeah, the stereotype playa-wear thang does induce a degree of misanthropy. Although you see glimpses of it at Nowhere, it’s definitely not as established as at Burning Man. We provide ‘costume camp’ - a structure with a catwalk and over 500 costumes in it which are available to wear and people obviously bring their own too. Unlike in the U.S, we don’t have a Haight Street which milks the pre-playa frenzy through selling all the stereotypcial costumey bits and pieces so I think there may well be higher levels of creativity at Nowhere?
Ruby at Nowhere, 2009
Ruby and friend at Burning Man, 2008. Note the subtle differences.
Drugs. What´s exciting about Euros and the way they do drugs, or are you on the American schedule, or what? And do you drink more in the Spanish desert? And by the way - why Spain? Is Spain for some reason constitutionally better suited for hosting a sort of Burning Man event? Could it happen in England and if so would it be all lager, all the time, and ranting about football?
Hhmmmmm…… obviously we have our fair share of intoxicants at Nowhere, which differ from the States as drugs do from place to place. Apparently we had a Ketamine Thursday, Acid Friday and MDMA Saturday at Nowhere this year but that kinda slipped me by and there are plenty of people who don’t partake in recreational drugs. I have to say though, there is a silly amount of booze that’s drunk, which combined in the Spanish heat can be kinda disastrous.
Why Spain?
Because it’s hot and we can rely on good weather, because laws are a little more lax and we can get away with more, because in the area we are in (Los Monegros) there is a lot of space far away from civilisation which allows us to create our alternative reality and forget about the rest of the world, which would not be so possible in over-populated England.
Ruby and Hippie Tim, Nowhere
Fucking. Do you think the fucking is more or less at Nowhere? From what i´ve seen in my 2000 to 2007 journey at Burning Man, despite the prevalence of sandstorms, dust storms, cold weather, and collective psychic new age madness, there´s a hell of a lot of free love going on at Burning Man. You mentioned the Kiwi Burn (New Zealand) being a lot more conservative than the US counterpart (with even nudity being mildly avoided) … what about Nowhere? Do people fuck a lot there? Is it even allowed?
We have a policy against public copulation at Nowhere which is strictly enforced…. nah…just kidding. Yeah, things can get pretty wild… We create a completely free environment, an alternate reality where usual norms do not apply and everyone gets so beautiful and sexy after running around in the dirt for weeks so yeah… bring on the free love! Some of my favourtie memories are of our traditional naked mud wrestling on the odd occasion it does rain and the site turns into a writhing mass of naked dirty hippies…
I should have asked this question first, cuz it´s a nuts-and-bolts type of thing. How many people are at Nowhere, how long does it take, and how the hell do you communicate .. is everyone glomming through a mucky spanish, or is the universal language British .. how does this whole thing work?
Nowhere has pretty much doubled in size since it’s beginnings in 2004 and we sold just over 500 tickets this year. It’s usually from a Wednesday to a Sunday in the middle of July about an hour and half from Zaragoza in Spain. Because most of us who organize are based in London most communication is in English but we have really started to try and diversify our languages and make Nowhere feel more European so this year all our newsletters were translated into different languages, we had translators on site and workshops and signs and information in languages other than English. I think we had around 150 French people this year, which was pretty epic..
Like Burning Man we have a DPW - ‘werkhaus’ who arrive several weeks before the event starts and stay until the bitter end. I think this year we had about 90 volunteers at our peak, from all over the world, doing everything form constructing the Middle of Nowhere (our centre camp) to making signs, working in the kitchen, fluffing teams etc.
We also have art grants to give away each year and are in the middle of organizing an artists retreat in Spain later this year which will serve to connect artists and members of the local Spanish community.
Nowhere is a pretty amazing little event because it has all the same prinicples as Burning Man but is still so small and intimate… it’s small enough that we really feel like a family and you also have the feeling of being able to really create an impact on the dynamic of the event by what you choose to do and the ways you choose to give. And although Nowhere was initially inspired by Burning Man, and will always stick to those core principles, I think most of us feel like we’d rather not look at it as an offical regional burn but let it follow it’s own path, whatever it may be and it’s still very much in that early undefined stage where it’s future is unknown and could unfold in so many different ways, depending on what we choose to create….
For more info on any of this, check out www.goingnowhere.org
