kuker.art.car @ DHFest
One thing I’ve enjoyed about Desert Hearts fest and Dirtybird campout are the art cars that they attract and let in. The @kuker.art.car (look em up on ig) was at Desert Hearts festival this year and I enjoyed chatting with the folks behind it - a cool and friendly group of Bulgarian burners from LA. This is the second incarnation of this art car and its styled as an ancient pagan Bulgarian Ritual Dancer to scare away evil spirits and provide good harvest, health, and happiness :)
I found it fun watching folks at the festival warm up to it and grow more comfortable interacting with it more and more throughout the weekend.
The first afternoon, I climbed up onto the back with my camera looking to see if it lended any interesting perspectives that might catch my eye for a photo. While there, I had a lovely time chatting with Stani while sitting on the back of it as the whole chassis bounced around from the folks dancing up top. She’d helped build the art car and it was fun to hear about how it was built, the background behind it, and what their hopes were for it.
The front mouth area inside is a cushy bed - as people warmed up to it and realized they could interact with it, I enjoyed the funny sight of seeing lounging legs sticking out of the mouth as the whole car sort of bounced around like it was munching on them.
She said they started building this second version of it back in 2020 and were taking it on a tour of a few festivals to get some test driving in before the group takes it to Burning Man this year. I didn’t get any photos of the car at night, but it was also fun - there’s lots of lights on it and the disco-ball eyes light up and bounce around.
After chatting with Stani, I offered a group photo of folks who brought the art car to the festival together using some OneInstant peel-apart film I’d brought with me. I shot this with my Mamiya RB67 with a Polaroid back. The way this peel-apart film works is that there’s a vertical reservoir of developer chemicals on the right-hand side of the photo paper and after you expose the paper in the camera, you pull it out through some rollers that smears the chemicals across the paper. I’m not sure if its an issue with my particular polaroid back’s rollers or just the nature of the OneInstant paper itself, but it always seems to get these incomplete smears. I like the effect, though. If I wanted perfect photos, I’d just shoot something digitally :)
There’s something about the physical process that makes this shot so interesting to me. The result is delicate, incomplete, and almost fleeting in a way that feels somehow a fitting medium for capturing a fraction of the moment I shared with them. After this photo, we spent some time dancing and chatting about our plans on the playa this year - maybe I’ll track them down again there and gift them another polaroid print of the art car at its intended home.
The sun was hot and intense out there on the beach with my pale Seattle skin, and I was happy that I managed to not get crispy. There were a lot of fun sun parasols around and it made me want one.
As I was sitting and chatting with Stani, the dude up top with the orange and green balloons (filled with nitrous oxide) climbed up. He had a yellow glass goblin head pendant around his neck which I recognized from the Glass Alchemy borosilicate glass color demo posters by Mike Shelbo. Not really my personal style vibe but I thought it was cool seeing one of those in the wild (they’re bigger than I expected, maybe 3-4 inches across), so I tried to chat with him about it. He tried to quiz me on who the artist was - I couldn’t remember the name off the top of my head but offered how I recognized it from the Glass Alchemy color demos poster and thought it was cool seeing one in person. He took a sip off his balloon, let out a whip-it laugh and just kind of stared at me. alright, good chat, haha. I went back to chatting with Stani and we both chuckled and felt like the goblin face pendant was the kind of evil spirit that the car was supposed to be warding away.
One thing I enjoyed about bringing the Mamiya to the festival was that it was a really slow process to take a photo. I had it on a tripod and it took quite a while to go through finding an angle, focusing, taking out the light meter to figure out exposure, standing around, deciding not to take the shot, chatting with folks, measuring the light again, trying to take a shot but the shutter won’t press, realizing I forgot the dark-slide in so i missed it, and repeat haha. The whole process makes it pretty obvious that you’re taking a photo and the slowness of it seems to invite people into being more candid than when they realize they’re in the frame of an instagram story or with a fancy DSLR pointed at them.
“Are you taking a photo?”
“I’m thinking about it - I like this perspective looking out over the beach from here, still getting the camera set up”
“Am I in the way?”
“Uh, you’re in the frame but I wouldn’t say you’re ‘in the way’, just do your thing :)”
“Ok… maybe I want to be ‘in the way’, though ;)”