The First Fire

Eighty Ukrainians, two domes, twenty hexayurts and 160 litres of homemade nastoyka. The year a thought from someone else's camp became a camp of our own.

Where it began · 2016

“What if there was a whole camp of us?”

The idea was born at someone else's camp. In 2016, on his second Burning Man, Yaro was camping with Broken Angels Bathhouse, a small American camp in the French Quarter. Three or four Ukrainians there became friends and spent the week on shared adventures, and the question kept coming back.

Back in Kyiv he told Ella. She said yes. The first friend he called was Yarik Mamay: “Let's do it.” Then Oleksii Novikov. One autumn evening, around Yaro's kitchen table, they argued it out. Varenyky? No. A bar with Ukrainian nastoyky? Yes. And the theme would be Ukraine itself, at a time when no camp on the playa had ever been built around a country. Oleksii gave it a name: Kurenivka.

Summer 2016

Broken Angels Bathhouse, French Quarter. The idea.
Autumn 2016

Ella, Mamay, Novikov say yes. A name: Kurenivka.
January 2017

A Burning Man talk in Kyiv fills the room to the aisles. Sasha Ovsianko joins.
The next morning

About 60 people have filled in the sign-up form.
August 2017

Black Rock City. The build begins.

campers: about 60 from Kyiv, 20 from Dnipro

hexayurts, built in two weeks

domes: a lounge and a round bar

160 L

of homemade nastoyka, two bottles in every suitcase

The build

Harder than anyone planned

The build crew landed two weeks before the gates opened. A week of hardware stores and lumber yards in the US, then the desert: twenty hexayurts, kitchen, shade, and a hundred pieces of flat-pack plywood furniture that Ros Rusakov put together. That furniture is still standing ten years later.

Nobody had guessed how heavy it would be, physically and emotionally. It was the first lesson the camp would keep relearning: the burn starts long before the Man.

The first build crew on two pickup trucks by a warehouse — 21 August 2017. The first build crew, before the drive to the playa.

A pickup truck loaded with lumber at a hardware store

Two white pickup trucks by a warehouse, people standing on them with arms raised

A crew posing on and around white pickup trucks outside a warehouse

A pickup truck bed loaded with lumber at a hardware store loading area

A white pickup truck loaded with boxes and gear parked on a residential street

A pickup truck beside shopping carts full of supplies in a parking lot

Two pickup trucks next to an open shipping container on the desert playa, rolled mats loaded on a truck

The camp

Two domes and a colour that chooses your drink

For a theme camp, the lounge is the art: it's where you host. Kurenivka built two geodesic domes, their canvas painted by artist Oleksandra Stepanenko. One was a closed lounge to hide from the dust storms. The other was a round bar with a round counter.

Ella decided the bar would be pink. Inside, illustrations by Ukrainian artists were printed on fabric, cut out and tied to the canvas in a mosaic. At the counter you pressed a button, the lights shimmered and settled on one colour, and the colour chose your drink. Green meant absinthe.

Campers in goggles and dust masks in front of the domes

Design plan of the fabric mosaic for the bar dome

Three people with arms raised in front of a painted geodesic dome in a dust haze

A group in goggles and dust masks taking a selfie in front of the painted dome

Two men in lit-up straw hats inside a dome glowing pink and red

Design plan of the dome canvas panels with numbered illustrations

“When the bar was finished, Ella and I stood inside it and hugged. We had both seen it: what we imagined had come true.”

Yaro Korets, camp lead

The gift

160 litres, salo and a cucumber

The drinks were Yaro's own. He distilled samohon in Kyiv and turned it into absinthe, kalganivka, lemon and cherry nastoyky. Every camper carried two litre bottles across the ocean.

Picture the desert at noon, and someone pours you 50–60% nastoyka with a slice of salo and a pickled cucumber on the side. People were shocked, then delighted. The kompot disappeared much faster.

Inside the bar dome at night, string lights and drinks on the counter

Guests at the round bar counter at night

A woman at a round bar counter inside the dome, a bartender behind her

A man holding a yellow bottle in a crowd on the playa, a tall structure behind

Art of the year · Radical Ritual

Female Ritual

All week, artist Slava Gudenok sculpted a life-size figure from clay, right in camp. It wasn't pretty in the glossy sense, and it was made with enormous love. On Friday before Burn Night the camp held its own ritual: the figure was fired on the playa, with a performance around the flames.

Slava now serves in Ukraine's air defense, shooting down missiles aimed at civilians.

Photo: Female Ritual, the clay figure fired on the playa

Pendant 2017

Pendant of the year

The first Kurenivka pendant, designed by Ella. Her first design work for the camp.

SoundCloud player

Track of the year

Chosen by Mamay. [Coming soon]