The Burning Man Festival takes place every year since 1991 in Black Rock City, Nevada desert, with a mood that is very reminiscent of Mad Max. The most important event from which it takes its name is the great fire of a big wooden puppet. This tradition continues since 1986, when Larry Harvey and Jerry James, the Festival’s founders, celebrated the summer solstice burning a big puppet on San Francisco’s Baker Beach. The spirit of the event is wild and is described by the organizers as a sort of “social experiment”, where everyone can feel free to express himself with performances, dances, exhibitions and even workshops.
One of the peculiarities of the Burning Man Festival is the massive presence of mutant vehicles, cars transformed in the most bizarre and creative possible ways. Another important peculiarity is the payment with barter exchange. Participating at the Burning Man Festival is a unique experience full of adrenaline, an opportunity to bring out our most authentic side, without constraints, limits or rules.
In the center of the Festival reserved area every year is build a structure representing the Burning Man Temple: it respect the Festival principles such as “Civic Responsibility” and “Leaving No Traces”.
It is one of the most significant places of the Burning Man Festival, it represents a portal for healing, sharing emotional experiences, creating deep connections with yourself and with the others. Then it will be burned down during the last day.
The temple is a special place for the community to pray, to heal and to release pain. It is a place where to cry together for losses, whether it is a loved one or an elderly person.
At the 2018 Burning Man Festival, the famous Architect Arthur Mamou-Mani designed and built the Galaxia Temple. It celebrated hope in the unknown, in the stars, planets, black holes, in the movement that unites us in whirling galaxies of dreams. Galaxia was formed by 20 wooden trusses that converged like a spiral towards a point into the sky.
The triangular trusses formed different paths towards a central space ending with a gigantic 3D printed mandala, the heart of Galaxia. The first wooden modules started large enough to contain small alcoves where people could write in peace the messages that would be burned with the Temple. Then, while people were walking on the path under Galaxia, the wooden modules rose and became thinner towards the sky in order to reach the central mandala.
In the center of Galaxia’s heart there was a collection of objects that fell from various heights from the highest part of the temple ceiling. These objects represented the tears of the people inside the “healing from pain” Temple. These objects were 3D printed with bio-plastic materials on Delta WASP 3MT INDUSTRIAL thanks to the open source software Silkworm for Grasshopper3D.
3D Printed Teardrop is the name of the single object created by WASP for Galaxia. It represented the tears of sadness and joy that condensed into a central incandescent movement. Then they rose towards the sky while under these suspended tears there was a ripple in the ground, representing the expected tear’s fall.
Here is an image before the realization:
The project was designed in London, the code optimization work was managed remotely by WASP in Massa Lombarda. The fifty 3D Printed Teardrop pieces were realized in Reno with a Delta WASP 3MT printer installed inside The Generator, a space dedicated to the construction of various Burning Man facilities.
The partnership with Studio Arthur Mamou-Mani is a milestone for WASP. WASP founded a WASP HUB in London that collaborates with the Studio in the creation and production of 3D printed pieces of various sizes and materials for international projects.
This video shows the construction of the colossal Galaxia Temple of Burning Man 2018:
You must know that all the activities dedicated to the realization of the Festival are managed by volunteers. The management behind a similar event is huge, but all the volunteers are drove by: a great passion for the project, vision, utopia and love.
Davide and Cristiano from WASP Team flew to Reno to participate voluntarily and actively in the event. The report was made by Cristiano often in bad conditions, which makes it truly authentic.
Here you can see some moments lived by Davide and Cristiano during the event: one of the most exciting of these was the marriage of Arthur.
This fantastic video shows one of the central events of the Festival. We will always be grateful to Davide and Cristiano that allowed us to burn our letters with the temple of healing from pain.
In the pictures above you can see our guys engaged in one of the most important phases: cleaning the desert. Volunteers clean the site so that nothing remains of the passage of the human being. For this reason, during the event, water, food and waste are meticulously managed and controlled.
