Olivier Bonin: Dust & Illusions – 30 years of history of Burning Man

Photo: 2010 Madnomad Films

Dust  & Illusions is the only worthwhile documentary about Burning Man. Most are navel-gazing, utopian affairs.

Documentary film Dust & Illusions by Olivier Bonin explores the thirty years of history of the Burning Man festival. Burning Man is a week-long annual event that began in San Francisco’s Baker Beach in the mid-1980s and then migrated to the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada. It takes its name from the ritual burning of a large wooden effigy. The event is described as an experiment in community, art, radical self-expression, and radical self-reliance and it is the largest cultural and art event in North America. From the renegade spirits of the 1970s in San Francisco, to the multi-million dollar business the event has become, the film looks at this necessary and explosive evolution.

The screening at the Stara mestna elektrarna will introduce Slovenian audiences to the topics discussed by John Law, one of the founding members of the Burning Man festival, in his lecture, which will take place as part of the Networked Disruption seminar in March in Kino Šiška.

Olivier Bonin was born in France and holds an engineering degree in microelectronics. He showed an early interest in photography and film. He studied photography in San Francisco, where he found his way into filmmaking. Starting with short fictions, he quickly found a perfect symbiosis between his interest and knowledge in social movements and documentary filmmaking. When he attended the Burning Man festival, he knew he had found a great subject combining film photography in such a beautiful environment with a complicated human story about community building.

John Law (USA) was one of the founders of the Cacophony Society in 1986. Emerging from the ashes of the mysterious and legendary Suicide Club, the Cacophony Society was an informal, unclassifiable group of anonymous people who spent their time exploring the boundaries of a conformist society, and occasionally crashing them. They sought imagination, adventure and mutual trust beyond the pale of those provided by mainstream society: that involved playful ways of disrupting propaganda, mocking respected symbols (like in their infamous Santarchy, an invasion of rebellious Santas), exploring forbidden urban space (from sewers to bridges), rebuilding freedom through mayhem, confusion, dangerous operation and sometimes just outright madness. Mostly harmless, often illegal, always fun.

Production: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana