Profound. Life-changing. Unforgettable. And more fun than you can shake a stick at.
Fellow Flowstar Cassidy Parker and I have been immensely privileged to be part of Metamorphosis, the crew that built the temple at this year’s AfrikaBurn, the annual regional Burning Man event.
For those readers unfamiliar with AfrikaBurn, it’s an enormous, week-long arts festival held in the Tankwa Karoo at the end of April. But this is no ordinary festival, and there’s a lot more to it than cool things to see: spectators are also participants, and the art is there to be seen, touched and interacted with. It is a leave-no-trace event, and it’s decommodified – money has no place or value there.
Central to AfrikaBurn are enormous (and some not-so-big) artworks created especially for the event, and which are razed during the week. And central to each Burn is the temple, a place where people can go to reflect, pray, contemplate, remember lost loved ones, just be spiritual.
A three-storey high construction consisting of butterfly wings supporting a central flower of life, Metamorphosis was intended to bring about change within those who saw it.
But when Cass and I signed up for the project, the dream of our dear friend and crew leader Verity Maud, I don’t think we quite realised just how much it would touch our lives – or, indeed, how deeply we would move thousands of others.
From late January, the brilliant Metamorphosis crew hunched over jigsaws and drills in a set-building workshop in Kew, Johannesburg, laboriously cutting out the butterfly wings and fashioning the pieces into transportable sections. We poured our love and energy into the project, and forged enduring friendships with our fellow crew members.
A little more than two months later, we made the arduous trek to Stonehenge, the remote farm in the desert between Ceres and Calvinia where the Burn is held. And believe me when I say “arduous” – getting there involved dragging the temple parts, food, water, shelter, clothing, costumes, stuff to give away and more for over 1 000km, including along the lousiest stretch of road in South Africa.
For a week before the event, the crew built the temple in the middle of the AfrikaBurn playa, braving the searing sun and the terrible dust. Oh, the dust – it’s everywhere, gets into every nook and cranny, coats everything. Veterans chuckled about it beforehand, but we had to experience it first-hand. Eventually you give up, and just wallow in the dirt like everyone else.
Late on the evening of Saturday, 25 April, it was at last finished, in time for the Burn’s start on 27 April. It was a remarkable achievement: a bunch of amateurs had not only fabricated and built this enormous artwork, but we’d done it without construction headaches, and nary an injury or even a raised voice.
Just how remarkable it was, however, only became apparent as the Burn week wore on. People were encouraged to use the space and write messages on the wings, things they wanted to let go of, be rid of. The messages they wrote were heart-rending; my wife Tania and I were drawn back to the temple every day, and invariably we’d be reduced to tears by the words scrawled on her.
When the time came to burn Metamorphosis on the evening of Saturday, 2 May, many of us in the crew were beginning to waver. We didn’t really want to destroy this beautiful thing that we had created. But that’s part of what the Burn is all about: letting go.
I admit freely that I sobbed when she was torched, the flames giving jagged red, yellow and black colour to the wings as they were consumed. One by one the wings gave in and the flower of life, once high above us, slowly turned vertical and stayed so for a few minutes, before gently crumpling into the pyre. Scores of dust devils, almost like departing souls, whirled out of the fire and towards the ring of spectators, disappearing out of the firelight and into the dark.
What was also significant was that it was AfrikaBurn’s first silent burn. The omnipresent thumping music had been turned off, and the spectators had been asked to not whoop and holler like they normally would. It was surreal and terribly poignant watching Metamorphosis go, the only sound the crackling of the fire.
Here's a time-lapse video of the burning of Metamorphosis, posted on YouTube by Stephan Hambsch:
AfrikaBurn wasn’t all serious, though – between all of the parties, the cameraderie, the unstinting generosity of strangers and the clever, often-hilarious creativity all around us, we had a whale of a time. AfrikaBurn is more than the sum of all its parts, and a lot of those parts are great fun.
But all of the wonderful things individual people expressed to us about Metamorphosis, and all of the things they have said on Facebook since, have brought home to us just how we have inspired them to bring about change in their own lives. None of us will ever be the same again either.