Burning Man announces 2023 festival theme, Animalia

Burning Man has revealed the theme for its 2023 festival: Animalia.

Announced in the Burning Man Journal’s “philosophical center” with a lengthy statement, the Animalia theme “will celebrate the animal world and our place in it”, the team wrote. They clarifying that animals can be “real and imagined, mythic and remembered”.

The 2023 theme also “explore[s] the curious mental constructs that allow us to believe that imagined animals are real, real animals are imagined, and that somehow, despite all evidence to the contrary, mankind is somehow not part of the animal kingdom… So why, then, do so many of us live in a make-believe world where humans are somehow apart from and superior to the rest of the animals in the zoo?” The next edition will focus on “…embracing the fact that we live in a world that is bigger than us, and acknowledging that we are part of a system rather than its masters.”

Burning Man 2023 will take place from 27th August through 4th September at the temporary Black Rock City, which reforms every year in Nevada for the festival over nearly four decades. The 2022 festival saw more than 80,000 attendees, causing 12-hour-plus traffic jams as the festival closed.

Read the Burning Man Journal’s post in full here.