Following in the tradition of Burning Man artworks returning to San Francisco for temporary public installations, my beloved Flaming Lotus Girls have installed their colossal steel and light sculpture SOMA at Pier 14. And this Friday, Aug. 1, they’ll be hosting a dance party reception from 5-9pm to celebrate the occasion.
Longtime Guardian readers may remember the 2005 immersion journalism project when I worked for with the Flaming Lotus Girls for nine months documenting the creation of a large-scale art project and what motivates people to volunteer their time and energy for such an undertaking (The reporting for that article, “Angels of the Apocalypse,” helped form the basis of my 2011 book, The Tribes of Burning Man: How an Experimental City in the Desert is Shaping the New American Counterculture).
Since then, the Flaming Lotus Girls have gone on to create even more impossibly epic creations for Burning Man and other festivals around the world, from Robodoc in Europe to the Electric Daisy Festival in Las Vegas. But this is the first time that one of their massive artistic creations has ended up back in a prominent spot in San Francisco, where they work out of the Box Shop on Hunters Point.
So go check out SOMA and stop by this Friday to mix and mingle with the Flaming Lotus Girls.