In 2004 Larry Harvey wrote down ten principles that describe the culture of Burning Man. They are not rules. They describe how a city of strangers can live together for a week.
Here is how Kurenivka lived each of them for ten years, where we got it right, where we learned the hard way, and why we think they are worth carrying home.
01
Kurenivka started with a Facebook post and a talk in Kyiv. At the end of the evening we shared a sign-up form, and by the next morning about sixty people had applied. Most of them had never been to the desert.
Over ten years the camp grew from 80 people to 215, with Ukrainians from Kyiv and Dnipro, friends from New York and an Italian art team who built their own honorarium piece inside our camp.
We never chose people by status or experience. The camp works like a magnet and a filter at the same time: the right people find it and stay.
02
In 2017 eighty campers each carried two litres of home-made nastoyky to the desert: 160 litres of cherry, galangal, lemon and absinthe, poured for free with salo and pickled cucumber.
In 2022 the gift was a whole camp: a free summer camp in the Carpathians for children of soldiers and families affected by the war. Where a family could not afford the train, the camp bought the tickets.
A gift with nothing expected back changes the person who gives it as much as the one who receives it.
03
Nothing in Kurenivka was ever for sale: not the drinks, not the sets on the art car, not a place in the lounge.
We also learned this principle the hard way. In 2019 our Palace of Culture in Kyiv needed to make money to survive, and that question split the team. The camp outlived the building.
When nothing has a price, people meet as people. That is the thing guests remember years later.
04
Every year the build crew arrives about two weeks before the burn: a week of buying materials in the US, then building hexayurts, domes, a kitchen and showers in the dust.
In 2018 the moulds for the AI.TLants figures failed on the playa. Instead of giving up, the team welded the whole project from metal on site.
The desert does not care about plans. It teaches you that you can do much more than you thought.
05
Our theme from day one was Ukraine itself: its drinks, its artists, its history. Before us, no camp at Burning Man was built around a country.
Female Ritual, a life-size clay sculpture fired on the playa in 2017. Sorry, glowing letters by Oleksiy Sai. The Hedgehog Temple made of anti-tank hedgehogs. Blue Bull, a painting by Maria Prymachenko that learned to drive.
The world knows Ukraine through the news. On the playa people met it through art, and that conversation was ours to start.
06
Kurenivka was never one person's project. Ros Rusakov assembled our first plywood furniture, which has now served for ten years. Artists painted the domes, friends welded, cooked, drove trucks and wired sound.
In 2025 the camp assembled Merman on the playa without its original build team, which had to stay in Kyiv.
What we built together always turned out bigger than anything one of us could have imagined alone.
07
On 1 March 2022 we launched the Ukrainian Burners Refugee Support Initiative to connect Burners around the world with people who had to leave their homes.
In Odesa, Yaro set up bomb shelters with backup power and communications for the residents of the buildings his company managed. The skills came straight from the desert.
Burning Man teaches you to build a city from nothing. In a war, that turned out to be a very practical skill.
08
Every structure we bring we also take away. Our furniture, domes and shade have travelled from year to year instead of becoming waste.
[Our Leave No Trace story: camp MOOP sweeps, the inspection result, what we changed after a bad year.]
A city of seventy thousand people disappears in a week. It only works if every camp cleans up after itself.
09
In Kurenivka everyone works: build shifts, kitchen shifts, bar shifts, strike. There are no guests who just watch.
On the rainy night of 2025, when the party on the art car was washed out, campers carried the speakers to the lounge through the puddles, and the whole neighbourhood danced until morning.
You only feel at home where you have put in your own hands.
10
Some of our best moments were never planned: the drink oracle choosing your glass by colour, a set by Benny Benassi in a wet tent, the crane lowering the Hedgehog Temple to the ground and the tears that came with it.
Every year, wherever Kurenivka was, in the desert, on the Dnipro, by a lake or in the mountains, something burned on burn night. The fire always happens now.
The playa takes your phone's attention away and gives you the moment back. That is why we kept coming back for ten years.
The principles do not end at the gate. They are how we try to live the other 51 weeks of the year.
KURENIVKA