The Village Ukraine talks to Vitaliy Deynega and Oleksii Sai – the team behind Ukraine’s Burning Man appearance – about why Ukrainians should have their voices heard in the Black Rock Desert.

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This year’s Burning Man took place in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert between 27 August and 4 September. The festival, one of the largest arts events in the world, has been held every year since 1986. This year’s theme – Animalia – celebrates “the animal world and our place in it,” according to the organizers.

Ukraine first presented its own Burning Man installation in 2015. Then as now, large-scale Ukrainian structures traveled across continents, despite logistical issues and Russia’s invasion, to use the medium of art to highlight what’s happening in the country.

It was Vitaliy Deynega, Ukraine’s Deputy Defence Minister and founder of the Come Back Alive NGO, who proposed that Ukraine take part in this year’s Burning Man. It was artist Oleksii Sai who came up with the concept and brought it to life. Alla Lopatkina, a member of the Ukrainian diaspora in the US and founder of a Chicago-based logistics firm and the Ukrainian Resistance Foundation, co-organized and funded the endeavor. Artist Dana Kosmina and members of the GogolFest team contributed to the project. 

Iryna Vyhovska, editor of The Village Ukraine, talked to Deynega and Sai about the project’s planning, the idea behind it, and the importance of Ukraine taking part in the festival.

The artwork will only be revealed after the ritual burning of the casing

On 28 August, the day we record our interview, a group of construction workers put the last nail in the wooden planks concealing Ukraine’s installation, which rises eight meters tall in the Black Rock Desert. “This structure is similar to the ones we’re using to protect monuments in Ukraine,” Vitaliy Deynega says.

The installation itself will be revealed on 31 August, when the wooden casing will be set on fire. “It’s the first time in the festival’s history that a Ukrainian group is allowed to set something on fire. [It is usually the festival organizers’ prerogative to burn the towering main installation - ed.] This happened at the stage of initial discussions. The organizers liked our idea from the get-go,” Oleksii Sai says.

Sai already has experience with Burning Man installations. In 2018, he and his team failed to raise enough funds to bring their idea into reality and were forced to pivot at the last minute. They ended up using lamps to create the word “sorry” – which Sai says has lost its real meaning and become a throwaway word. This year’s installation was sponsored by Alla Lopatkina, an American businesswoman originally from Ukraine. The sculpture was created at her firm’s production facilities in Chicago. “Burning Man installations can cost anything from 50,000 dollars to several million. Ours is a relatively cheap design. It cost around 100,000 dollars, though it’s hard to say what the final figure was,” Deynega says.

What’s under the casing?

The wooden planks conceal a sculpture called Phoenix, which looks a lot like the tryzub, or trident, Ukraine’s national emblem. “This is a brutalist rendition of the tryzub or phoenix. The phoenix will be revealed after the casing burns down. It’s [an artwork] about Ukraine and its people, who rise from the ashes every time. It’s not a complicated artwork – there’s no need for convoluted interpretations. It’s a monumental structure, eight meters tall – its meaning and message should be straightforward,” Sai says.

A team of around 20 people worked to create Phoenix: around half of them stayed in Ukraine and the other half traveled to the Black Rock Desert. Dmytro (Mitia) Zinoviev, director of the Workshop of Miracles (Maisternia Chudes) design and research bureau, was in charge of assembling the sculpture. This spring, he assembled an art installation called Home.Memories at the Akademik Vernadskyi Research Station in the Antarctic. “I told Mitia he should go to a desert after the Antarctic; he agreed straightaway,” Sai says with a smile.

“Most of the team – especially the guys – had to stay in Ukraine for obvious reasons. But our explosives expert will be there, in the desert; he figured out how exactly the casing will burn and what the installation will look like when it happens. Unfortunately, it was a tragic circumstance that made this possible: his father, also a famous explosives expert, Oleksandr Suvorov, was killed in the battle for Moshchun [in Kyiv Oblast]. People who have lost close relatives at war are exempted from military service,” Deynega said.

Initial testing for the burning was conducted in Kyiv Oblast. The team of artists set a similar structure on fire to at least get a sense of how the sculpture will look afterwards. “This structure is made up of three pipes, with smoke coming out of each of them. It should blacken, but it might also cave in. We’ll see. This is also part of the project – we can’t totally control what the phoenix will look like in the end,” Sai adds. “The metaphor is quite obvious.”

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The installation’s official description says that the artists’ goal is to change the way Ukraine is seen by the rest of the world, to foster an emotional connection to Ukraine. The team explains that the sculpture can be interpreted on two levels. On the one hand, the artists want to draw attention to the tireless work of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and the Ukrainian people. On the other hand, they want the sculpture to evoke personal struggle and suffering every Ukrainian has experienced with Russia unleashing its war of aggression.

Why does it matter?

“I remember talking to Alla [Kalitkina] about how Ukraine is increasingly being seen like Syria or Afghanistan by the West – a country of shootings and murder,” Vitaliy Deynega says when asked about his decision to take part in this year’s Burning Man. “That’s why it’s crucial for Ukraine to be represented abroad in spheres other than the military. Ukrainians who emigrated to the US in the 1990s or in early 2000s are representing Ukraine there now, but they’re different from today’s Ukrainians. They listen to music from the 90s and the diaspora events they organize revolve around vyshyvankas [traditional embroidered shirts] and varenyky [dumplings]. Ukrainian cuisine is probably the best represented aspect of Ukrainian culture in the US now. Ukraine as a modern country capable of contributing to global culture – not just consuming it – is only represented in the US by the band DakhaBrakha. But DakhaBrakha alone is not enough. That’s why we wanted to use art to talk about Ukraine, because art is a viral mode: if you find a good way to convey something, it gets widely shared by the media.”

Deynega also recalls that in 2015, when Ukraine first brought an installation to Burning Man, lots of people got tattoos of it and talked about it. That year’s installation didn’t draw attention to the war in Ukraine, whereas this year it was very important to carefully select the message, Deynega says.

“If you turn your TV on abroad, there’s less and less coverage of Ukraine. We are only at the forefront of people’s attention if we recapture a substantial chunk of land, or a missile hits a kindergarten – if something tragic or dramatic happens,” Deynega says. He adds that if Ukraine disappears from the spotlight, sooner or later [international] aid will peter out as well. That’s why Burning Man is an important platform where Ukraine can draw attention to its plight.

Oleksii Sai says that when Deynega suggested that he create something for the Burning Man festival, he had no doubt that it was a good idea: “We have to be represented on every possible platform. Burning Man is a very special place, a place where people perceive the world much more vividly. They will definitely remember it.”

Phoenix is Ukraine’s first installation that the festival organizers allowed to be set on fire. It’s also the first installation that won’t just burn to the ground, but a sculpture that will interact with fire – and will rise from it. The team behind Ukraine’s project thinks it will be a unique spectacle even by Burning Man standards and will impress festival attendees, some 80,000 of them.

Sai believes that it’s very important for Ukraine to be represented across all platforms, from large-scale pop-culture events to conceptual art: “We can’t ignore any of it: scientific gatherings, sporting events, concerts, exhibitions – Ukraine has to be represented everywhere.”

Sai’s previous project – the Russian War Crimes House exhibition – was first unveiled during the World Economic Forum in Davos in May 2022. It has since traveled to the NATO headquarters in Brussels and the European Parliament. Sai created a video installation that anchors the exhibition. “It’s made up of gigabytes of the most horrific images from photographers from across Ukraine; each of the 6,400 photos documents a war crime. I felt sick putting them all together, it’s horrible. But I did it so that people in parliaments all around the world would look at it and find themselves equally horrified. And then send us aid,” Sai explains.

Sai thinks that only having representatives in every sphere can help Ukraine stay on the global agenda. “United24 are doing a lot in this regard in pop culture, for example organizing a soccer match with global soccer stars. But you don’t have to be a large organization with a famous name – you can still do everything within your power as an individual [to contribute to these efforts].”

It’s crucial to try and produce cultural artifacts you’re not embarrassed of, Sai adds. You have to strive for a good outcome, not just do anything at all; you have to be strict with yourself and not waste resources. “It sounds easy: you come up with an idea, make a sketch, build an eight-meter-tall structure. In reality, it requires a lot of work. I couldn’t afford to forget that a lot of money has been spent on it and it’s got to be worth it,” Sai explains.

For Sai, it doesn’t make sense to compare contributions to cultural projects to contributions for weapons: “We still need culture a lot, but if the war continues to claim the lives of Ukrainians, we will stop investing in culture and will throw all we’ve got into fighting.”

What about funding?

Deynega says the best way to fund projects like this is to secure funding from private investors, as well as international grants. “I definitely wouldn’t ask the government to fund this – I’m already collaborating with a ministry,” he explains. It would be quite difficult to raise enough money in public donations. Deineho thinks that it’s up to people to decide whether it’s ethically appropriate to fundraise for a cultural project when you can fundraise for weapons and ammunition. You can fundraise for anything, and all fundraising causes have a right to existence, but each person has to decide for themselves whether to give their money to any given cause.

Deynega predicts that next year the team will be able to pitch their project directly to Burning Man organizers. “They seem to really like the way we’re working now, so if we put forward a reasonably interesting idea, we’ll be able to get a grant from the festival.”

What will happen to the installation?

After the festival, the festival site in the desert and the roads there are left completely clean. “Environmental inspectors even remove strands of hair from the sand,” Oleksii Sai recalls his previous Burning Man experience. The Phoenix sculpture revealed after the casing is burned will be removed from the desert – and possibly even installed elsewhere in the US.