The Pleasure Dairy

​about. a multi-year project that explores how a Burning Man Theme Camp can become an immersive art environment designed as a creative collective. This project was founded by Kate Greenberg, and has been co-lead with Danielle Bloyd, Bodie Bloyd, Robert Schweizer, and Alexandra Briggs (2023); and with Bodie Bloyd and Robert Schweizer (2024). Each year, 36 amazing campers have helped imagine and build our camp; many more volunteered for build and community art days. 

​

Finally, what you’ve been waiting for, a Burning Man camp that reimagines the little-known historic curiosity of pleasure dairies! A novel trend of the early modern era, pleasure dairies were pastoral retreats built by figures like Catherine de Medici and Marie Antoinette for themselves and their ladies. They were fanciful re-imaginings of ‘working’ diaries - where milk-based products were produced for sale - but these new dairies were built to be spaces for pleasure and leisure. Some historians believe they were places of frivolity, and that the wealthy used them to play-act at provincial life. But they also, and more significantly, were spaces to take refuge from the patriarchy of the court, where women could subvert the societal expectations of "polite society" and seek to practice feminine wellness and expression in their own way. We are reimagining what this pleasure practice would look like today, if we built it at Burning Man.

 

Our mission at The Pleasure Dairy is to create an immersive experience for the Burning Man community where we can make and hold space for creative expression and collaboration, and find inspiration and joy in creating magic and whimsy for our community together.

​

For 2023 we created our frontage, including a bar 'The Tits' that featured breast and chest paint impressions made by members of our community and water-misters that were sculpted based on real forms, as well as three small multi-sensory art experiences based on concepts about pleasure. The Comfort Zone explored pleasure + comfort, and the neurological effects of our environments. The Pleasure Diary was a poem-filled confessional about pleasure + memory, and the connection of physical joy with vulnerability. And Pleasure Justice explored pleasure + equity, and will be a place to visualize what pleasure freedoms and restrictions look like today around the globe. Art concepts were co-created with Adela Wagner

​

In 2024 we expanded our lounge to host a movement clinic, pleasure-fact bar trivia, and a Variety Arts Night. We also introduced an LED cactus garden, thematic projection mapping, and community-provided sound stories about armour and vulnerability. Cactus art concepts and LED coding were co-designed by Kaya Cooper, Bodie Bloyd, Rob Whitaker, and Zack Woodruff.