Artists from Yekaterinburg will present the DIPTOWN project at the Burning Man festival in Nevada. Until 07/10/22, anyone can contribute to it

A couple from Yekaterinburg, Irina and Stanislav Schminke, won a 2020 Black Rock City Honoraria Grant from Burning Man. Of all the selected applications, Irina and Stanislav are the only participants from Russia.

Because of the pandemic, the festival was forced to take a two-year break.

In 2022 the festival will take place from August 28 to September 5, where Irina and Stanislav will present their art object DIPTOWN, a city lost in the sand. A lost reality, a ghost town, a place where existence and non-existence intermingle.

Only the tops of the houses will be visible, and everyone is invited to complete the art object with a memory, an object, an idea, or a story, whether fictional or true. It could be a photo of a dog from your grandmother's village, a wallpaper pattern, a piece of graffiti, or the design of a billboard at the entrance to the city.

On their Instagram, the artists explain that DIPTOWN had no prototype when they came up with it, yet such places really do exist.

Take, for example, the village of Shoyna on the White Sea. It was once home to a fishing fleet base, with a population of about 1,500 people. But after industrial cod fishing was banned in the area, the settlement emptied out. Today Shoyna has 46 houses, home to no more than 300 people.

The Burning Man festival has been held annually since 1986. For a week in the desert, participants build a temporary city of contemporary art; it is a zone of self-expression with no restrictions, except that each participant is responsible for their own livelihood and for cleaning up every trace of their stay afterward.

On the festival's final day, a wooden figure of a man is burned, which is where the event gets its name. Annual attendance is around 80,000 people.