Video: Chris Piotrowicz
29 April to 5 May: the clan burns in t-minus:
Image credit: Sam Arn
AfrikaBurn is a community of participants who come together to create art, costume, performance, theme camps, music, mutant vehicles and much, much more. All of this is created through a volunteer and gifting culture.
The main annual AfrikaBurn event takes place in the Tankwa Karoo, located between the Northern Cape and Western Cape Provinces of South Africa, usually at the end of April every year.
AfrikaBurn’s aim is to be radically inclusive and accessible to anyone. The touchstone of value in our culture will always be immediacy: experience before theory, moral relationships before politics, survival before services, roles before jobs, ritual before symbolism, work before vested interest, participant support before sponsorship.
Guiding principles
AfrikaBurn is a Burning Man regional event, and our guiding principles are based on the Ten Principles of Burning Man, to which we have added an 11th, in 2011 – Each One Teach One – that encourages the sharing of knowledge.
These principles aren’t commandments, and they’re not rules – they’re ideals that offer guidelines to how we as a community can reinvent the world, and ourselves.
The organisation
Just as our community is made up of volunteers, so is the organisation that stages the annual AfrikaBurn event and related initiatives.
Afrika Burns Creative Projects (AfrikaBurn) was created in 2007 as a Not-For-Profit Company, with the intention that it would serve as a vehicle for the co-ordination of a South African Burning Man regional event.
how we work
As a Non-Profit Company, AfrikaBurn has a two-tiered governance structure consisting of Members and Directors.
AfrikaBurn’s Memorandum of Incorporation (or founding documents) clearly and legally define the organisation’s purpose and object – both of which explicitly include the core principles of Communal Effort, Participation, Civic Responsibility, Immediacy, Decommodification, Gifting, Leaving No Trace, Radical Inclusion, Radical Self-Reliance, Radical Self-Expression and Each One Teach One.
AfrikaBurn will blow your hair back whichever way you choose to experience it. The more you do, the more fun you’ll have – guaranteed, because it’s a do-ocracy – a place where you’re welcome to start something, make something or do anything (within reason). Forget standing at the sidelines – jump in with both feet and get busy!
Art & Performances
So here’s the deal: AfrikaBurn isn’t a music festival. What AfrikaBurn is, is a self-organised creative art experiment where you’re invited to be an artist or a performer and to join in and collaborate.
Theme camps
Theme camps are designed and created with the intention of welcoming, engaging and entertaining other participants. Think of them as little villages within the larger village of Tankwa Town.
Mutant vehicles
Mobile art? Damn right. At AfrikaBurn a piece of mobile art is called a Mutant Vehicle and they can include motorised …anything, really. Cars. Bikes. Couches. Bars. Jellyfish. Bees. Mice. Bunnies. Zebra. Pacman. You get the picture.
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