Burning Man Updates: The Festival Announces 2021 Theme

Burning Man is one of the most anticipated festivals for EDM fans, focusing on the EDM community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance. The festival is hosted yearly in the western United States. This year, on February 18, the organizers of Burning Man 2021 released an  update via their Burning Man Project’s blog, confirming various highly anticipated details of the festival’s 2021 edition, claiming it was “simply too early to make the call.” 

A fresh post published on March 9 announced one of the most critical aspects of the beloved festival to their community: its theme, Terra Incognita, meaning “unknown land,” from Latin, originally found in the works of the Egyptian scholar Ptolemy. As always, in the case of Burning Man, both the theme and the festival have a spiritual undertone behind them. The director of the Philosophical Center of Burning Man Project, Stuart Mangrum, who posted about the updates, covered the idea behind the theme, further explaining that it represents their “longing to reconnect” after the unfortunate events of 2020. He wrote, “It is in that spirit that we propose it as a watchword for this new age of exploration, fueled not by dreams of conquest but by a passion to rediscover ourselves – and each other – in a radically altered psychic and social landscape.” Yet, it is still not clear if it will be possible to reconnect in Black Rock City this year; fans still don’t lose their hope. 

The festival’s most recent statement claims, “This year’s Burning Man theme is an invitation to emerge from our collective isolation, to explore the unfamiliar contours of a changed world, and to reimagine ourselves, our community, and our culture in ways that might not have been possible before this period of plague and pause.”