BURNING SEED 2018
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City gave way to surburbia gave way to dusty farmland as we rolled our way northwards to Matong in New South Wales for Burning Seed. I hesitate to call this a festival as the Burning Man website describes the event as less of a festival and more of a community or cultural movement. Around 3500 ‘burners’, including me, sign up for the event and buy into its ten core principles, a network of perspectives that scaffolds everyones’ experiences together with enough freedom in between for discovery and chance. There isn’t any specified entertainment we have all paid to come and see, rather co-created art and experiences by all the participants.
Of all of the festivals I have been to prior to Burning Seed there is definitely something very different about a burn. The atmosphere is pretty jubilant because we’re all obviously there for good times but there’s also a calm, warm, relaxed vibe that puts everyone at ease. I’m yet to voyage over to Burning Man in Nevada but that was the case at Burning Seed. More than half of the participants come with theme camps which I think bonds people together and contributes to the smooth, round atmosphere.
We joined up with Telekinetic with whole hearts while they coincided to build an entire camp focused around audio-visual experimentation (massive thanks to everyone in the crew who were so welcoming and pulled us in to the fun). We lent our arms and legs to continuing the synthesised energy of camp-creation which must take Dave and the crew multiple weeks of the year to complete. My theory is that the fact that more than half of the participants are part of theme camps is why everyone is so much more invested in the positive experiences of everyone else around them.
One of the core principles of the burn is ‘gifting’ which goes hand-in-hand with one of the other principles, ‘decommodification’. No sponsorships, transactions or advertising can happen at the burn and so Gifting falls in the place of a currency as a contribution to the community. As well as offering an extra pair of hands here and there I offered to photograph the journey and so these are the images I took over the month preceding. They show a very small fraction of the work that goes in to getting a theme camp to Seed but I also wanted to capture some co-created experiences rather than skirt amongst them capturing moments from ostensibly nowhere.
I brought with me my 35mm cameras as well as an old manual medium format camera - a bulky, slow to use, lump of equipment made of I actually don’t know what. All I know is it seems to actually get heavier over the course of a day. This thing is not fast; taking each photo is like running through a pre-flight checklist. I wanted to photograph in a way that allowed me to be more integrated. Although it’s not particularly rare it seems more and more esoteric to be shooting on medium format these days which means it seems to get more attention than using a DSLR. Using film meant I could be present rather than checking out to that netherworld of the LCD screen to see the results. I’m not anti-digital by any means, I just found it fascinating how the lethargic pace of shooting with the medium format camera seemed to interlace with the co-creation mindset in such a beautiful way.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy these images as much I as I did putting it all together. Can’t wait for 2019!
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