Hours before taking his flight back to the United States, Stuart Mangrum (California, 62 years old) enjoyed an evening between pasodobles, falleras and a Valencian barbecue. I think they call her toast”, he says by video call, laughing as he mentions the dish in his San Francisco accent. He also apologizes for the emotional hangover that he suffers, once he has arrived home, after experiencing the festivities that Valencia celebrates in honor of its Virgen de los Desamparados. Mangrum knows them well, this is the fourth time he has signed up for the Fallas; he has been visiting them since he learned about 15 years ago that in eastern Spain they were given to setting fire to newly built monuments, as a way of welcoming spring, something that the Californian did not squeak at all. With the farewell to summer, every September he sees something similar at the end of the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert, of which he was director of communication and is now one of its main managers.
Mangrum’s intention in recent years, he says, is for Valencia to be the sister of such an event. If possible, a twin sister with whom there is trust, so that Fallas artists and the so-called burners can collaborate with each other. The first step was taken less than a decade ago. Some gigantic puppets from the Alicante company Carros de Foc arrived in the desert, apart from a cubic sculpture with more than 25,000 cardboard pieces by the sculptor David Moreno and the architect Miguel Arraiz, who is working on another work for the next Burning Man.
Arraiz was the one who invited the Californian to this year’s Fallas: on the occasion that Valencia is the World Design Capital 2022, he asked him to give a talk at the Center del Carme.
“I went mainly for the lecture,” says Mangrum, “but I couldn’t give it and then go home without staying in the city for a while.” The time lasted a week. “I had to write off the flights,” he jokes. In the talk he spoke about how much Black Rock City, the ephemeral municipality built to house the Burning, has changed in 30 years: “We chose the desert because there were no authorities, the closest city was 200 kilometers away and the police didn’t even know that we existed We could act a little more irresponsibly depending on the ethos that united us, quite anarchist”. The problem came when the capacity got out of control in 1996, there were traffic accidents and the first fatality. “We realized that if we wanted to continue this, we had to be our own authority, which changed everything,” he recalls.
Cars were banned and an urban plan was started, transforming the wide spaces for bonfires and madness into dense, pedestrian areas that were more conducive to relationships between burners unknown. Thus they set up a community that, with 80,000 attendees each year, for a few days represents the third largest metropolitan area in Nevada, behind Las Vegas and Reno. “It’s almost like Toledo,” she specifies.
He is in charge of disseminating the values of that city that he does not want to be considered a festival of rich children, although the tickets are close to 600 dollars. Although it sounds like that, Burning Man is not like Coachella. The analog of it would be rather the Trips Festival of 1966, in which the hippies of San Francisco met with the aim of elevating mundane life to a theatrical and sacred event.
In Black Rock City, the portable toilets of a few editions ago woke up with signs on the door that explain the philosophy of the complex. “Check here your inhibitions, fears, worries or prejudices. This is a temple of atonement.” Mangrum laughs: “There are thousands of great art projects as small as that where our ethos”. The spirit of Burning, whatever it may be, is lived and celebrated today in New Zealand, Japan, South Africa, Argentina, Israel and increasingly in the streets of Valencia, where wooden dolls and cork, Paquito the chocolatier and smiling falleras, all together around a large toast.
