Come Back Alive’s Vitaliy Deynega Reckons With the Destruction of Ukraine’s ‘Black Cloud’ at Burning Man

From the outside, Burning Man can look like a circus of mad dreamers; for the community that erects Black Rock City each year, it is a place where creativity thrives, alternative systems can be tested and imagination becomes a tool to connect mind and body in building something unprecedented. Burning Man also looks like pure fun from the outside. On the ground, in the heat and the playa dust, it can be an endurance test. Yet most who gather in the middle of the desert refuse to reduce the gathering to survival. Amid hardships, they create new art, new forms of human connection and new ways of imagining a future together.

After years of postponement, this is my first Burn. I am here with a mission: to observe, study and learn how this community has been experimenting with a radically different model of artistic production—bottom-up, ephemeral and resilient. It’s one that, despite countless challenges including the pandemic and then floods, continues to function. This year did not begin gently. On Saturday, a violent storm ripped through Black Rock City, damaging or completely destroying several installations.

I was still packing when I received an email pitching a story about the monumental inflatable installation Black Cloud by Ukrainian artist Oleksiy Sai. The subject line read: “A Warning to the World.” On August 24—Ukraine’s Independence Day and the opening day of Burning Man—Black Cloud was torn apart by a dust storm.

This artwork, an eight-ton inflatable powered by 90,000 cubic feet of air, was created to be both seen and heard. Described by its producers as a haunting soundscape, it served as its own metaphorical storm, bringing the lived reality of war into the Nevada desert. At fifteen meters high, seventeen meters wide and thirty meters long, the work took shape as a massive thundercloud made of forty-five interconnected inflatable forms. Inside, twenty strobe lights flashed like lightning, while a continuous sonic environment—composed of real sounds from the war in Ukraine—reverberated through the structure.

The installation was assembled overnight with the help of hundreds of volunteers and became one of the most striking works on the Playa. Its vast black mass—seemingly as diaphanous and unearthly as news from distant lands yet as heavy as the looming storm of planetary catastrophe—stood as a stark metaphor for the threat of global war.

By design, it should have withstood such weather, but as general producer Vitaliy Deynega wrote on Facebook: “It held against the wind for the first fifteen minutes, and then tore apart in the middle—the storm burst inside and destroyed it completely.” For many, the symbolism was immediate: an ominous parallel to Ukraine’s own fate, which, after more than eleven and a half years of war, faces the possibility of forced capitulation.

Just days earlier, the Alaska summit ended without a ceasefire or peace agreement for Ukraine. To this day, we still don’t know what was truly discussed behind closed doors between Putin and Trump—notably without Zelensky at the table—before European leaders rushed to Washington to meet with the U.S. president. “We genuinely see signs that a major global conflict is building—one that Western countries are either not preparing for, or not preparing enough,” Deynega told Observer. “After seventy years of peace, they believe that nothing truly bad can happen.” Back in 2022, Ukrainians themselves were warned to prepare for war, but tragically, they weren’t ready. “Now,” he continues, “we are telling the world: get ready.”

Black Cloud aimed to transplant Ukraine’s hard reality to the Nevada desert: the sounds of sirens, missiles and explosions (recorded by Denys Vasyliev) echoing around the installation in the middle of a DJ set and people enjoying themselves. But the work went even further, warning that this is no longer just about Ukraine—its message being “The storm is coming for you, too.”

“You won’t be able to keep living in the world you’re used to unless you take part in defending it,” Deynega insists. “This isn’t just about governments. It’s about each and every person.” Deynega warns that while the West still enjoys a technological edge over Russia, China and Iran, those regimes are adapting fast. “In some ways, they’re already fighting a more modern war than the West is ready for.” The West still has more technology, more money and more skilled people, but it needs to wake up before it’s too late.

“Just like the storm yesterday, it came suddenly. And when I woke up, everything around me was already flying apart,” he says. How quickly Black Cloud collapsed is precisely how quickly the world could collapse. Yet for Deynega, creativity offers hope. Art can respond in unexpected ways to catastrophe, reimagining strategies before collapse, perhaps even saving the Western world from what’s coming. Burning Man proved to be the perfect stage to test his theory.

For Deynega, no matter how bad things get, if one is still alive, there is always a way forward. To him, Burning Man is the perfect embodiment of that. “People here have been in the dirt, in tears, in full breakdowns, and still, everyone finds a way to laugh and celebrate, even in the middle of what feels like the apocalypse,” he concludes. “I think that Burning Man really gives people a chance to experience what it feels like to go through a catastrophe. And the most important thing in any catastrophe is not to give up.” Unsurprisingly, Black Cloud will have a European tour, with dates and locations to be announced soon.

The art of Burning Man

Every year on the Playa, hundreds of monumental artworks rise from the dust, built in just a few days, only to vanish a week later. These installations become sites of ritual, meditation, healing and collective awakening—reviving art’s primordial, sacred function that, in today’s art industry, is often commodified, instrumentalized and now, like the system itself, showing signs of collapse.

This year, more than 250 works are expected to go up across Black Rock City, alongside 77 Honoraria projects supported with $1.6 million in grants. In total, there will be more than 327 art installations—and likely closer to 350 when counting the smaller, last-minute contributions—built in the middle of nowhere, with no expected return, except, perhaps, to deliver a message.

Observer will be bringing you more dispatches from the Playa, as we explore what the art of Burning Man—created outside the usual circuits—has to tell us about the precarious state of our world.