Headwaters Is Heading to Burning Man: A Little Slice of the Paddock Goes to the Playa

Maja Sagaser does not, technically, call herself an artist.

But Burning Man does.

Headwaters, the NZ born project she’s leading with an all-girl crew, has received partial funding through a 2026 Burning Man Honoraria grant.

It is now growing from a Kiwiburn experiment into an installation bound for Black Rock City.

Before all that though, Headwaters was a sentence on a whiteboard.

A Grain Of Sand

Maja had gone to Burning Man for the first time with “no idea what to expect.”

Like many first-timers, she was looking for something.

Inspiration, maybe.

Meaning.

At the start of the week, she was sitting in a shipping container with a few people from camp and a whiteboard.

“I said, ‘What do you guys want to get out of this? Should we write something we’re trying to get from the experience down on this board?'”

Everyone wrote something.

    Maja wrote:

    Personal Growth

“Kept it pretty vague.”

The desert responded in a sort of monkey’s paw way.

“Immediately we just got pummeled by this wind storm and had to rebuild everything in the camp and kind of overcome the emotions that came up from that.”

By the time the desert started throwing grains of growth at the camp infrastructure, Maja had a lot of time to think.

What survived the storm was a realisation…

“I just left feeling so inspired by everybody’s creativity.”

On the Playa, there were the big structural pieces, which spoke directly to the part of her brain that enjoys load paths and plywood doing ambitious things.

“There was one piece with no instruction, but if you linked hands with a bunch of other people and you all held hands and then held on to one of the hands of the statues and you basically complete the circuit of the circle, then it started to play music.”


Then there was Chicken Ranch.

Some art reveals itself slowly.
Some art asks you to crawl through a net of rubber chickens honking.

“There’s definitely something out there for everyone. It’s like just a little alien world for you to go and explore when you’re out in the dust,” Maya says. 

And when the dust settled, a seed landed in a brain already full of the creeping suspicion that making something did not require permission from the serious art gods.

“I have some architectural design experience. I’m a practicing structural engineer. And I’m like, ‘I think that I could make something. And what would that be?’”

Not—

I know exactly what.

Or—

I’ve always wanted to be an artist.

Just…

“I think that I could make something.”

“I wanted to create something that prompts people to kind of have a moment to set that intention or reflect or come up with something that they would want to go forward with was really, I thought, an important piece of my experience.”

Please Don’t Take the Bricks

So at Kiwiburn this year, Maja tested it.

First, with a yellow brick labyrinth near the lower paddock and a poem that asked people between the lines not to nick the bricks.

She calls it the pilot version of Headwaters.

“I just kind of wanted to see what people’s reactions were to it, whether it actually got participation,” she says.

There seem to be two genuinely terrifying moments in making burn art:

The first is deciding you’re actually going to do it.

The second is walking away from it for the first time.

Because from that point on it belongs to everyone else.

When It Belongs to Everyone Else

“I definitely was really pleasantly surprised with the amount of engagement it got from people and how respectful people were of it,” Maja says. “You never know how people are going to interact with it.”

“Friends started gathering at the entrance and, like, one by one going through and actually doing it individually, which is kind of the intention, was really cool,” she says. “People just see it and want to walk it. The participation piece is absolutely crucial for the success of the project. We really don’t want to be too prescriptive.”

Headwaters, now supported in part by a 2026 Burning Man Honoraria grant, has grown into an immersive, light-based installation bound for Black Rock City.

It is being led by Maja with an international, NZ-started, all-girl crew, many of whom will be experiencing Burning Man for the first time.

The team has had to think through the practical realities of inviting people into a structure.

Will people feel claustrophobic?

What happens if someone needs to get out?

What if someone tries to climb it?

Can it hold up to whatever version of enlightenment involves leaning on bamboo at 2am?

No. 8 Wire Mentality

Finding It in the Dark

At night, Maja imagines people finding it before they understand it.

“It’s dark, there’s this sort of mountain-esque volume shape,” she says. “You get closer and you see magentas and greens and blues illuminating it.”

The path reveals itself slowly.

LED strips guide visitors towards the centre.

The bamboo throws shifting shadows.

There may even be native New Zealand bird calls drifting through the labyrinth.

“There won’t be anything more dramatically strobing,” Maja says. “It’ll just be this gentle light that kind of guides you.”

At the centre, the path opens out.

“There’ll be some extra space at the center for you to kind of reflect on what came up for you as you walked the labyrinth before you follow the path back out.”

It’s a remarkably ambitious thing to try and build.

A quiet moment.

Mate, you’re dreaming (of logistics)

There are power calculations. Controllers. Shipping.

A hundred metres of programmable LEDs.

There is also wind testing in Wellington, because where else would you prepare a desert installation except our own natural wind tunnel?

“We went out last weekend and got a couple rebars to yield just from the wind gusts,” Maja says, “so we were like, ‘Okay, well, we definitely need brackets.’”

But New Zealand has not only been a testing ground for the structure.

It has been a testing ground for the attitude.

“Kiwis have like, put on the gumboots, get it done, let’s get inventive, let’s figure it out.” 

Maja noticed the difference between Burning Man and Kiwiburn.

A kind of resourcefulness, a willingness to make something weird and bespoke and homemade and somehow structurally all good by morning.

“That was something that I definitely have enjoyed and want to carry into bringing the project over to the US.”

Most of the build and fabrication will happen in the United States in the weeks before the event, but much of the pre-work is happening here in Aotearoa.

The team has been thinking constantly about how to do things creatively, affordably, and with contingency for the inevitable moment when the desert tries to hurl growth at them again. 

“It kind of reminds me of the You’re Dreaming ad with the kids building the retaining wall. We’re doing some mock-up testing and stuff here in Wellington,” Maja says.

“I think that’s what we’re gonna try to take into the playa is just that, like, MacGyver it together.”

We Invite You to Fail

Maja almost didn’t apply.

The first stage was an expression of interest.

She made a paper model. 

“I really didn’t think it was going to happen for me,” she says. “I just kind of wanted to see how difficult it would be, and so I just started applying and had really low expectations.”

Maja was invited to the next round.

Put in some serious mahi. 

Then was awarded the grant. 

“It was kind of this, like, oh shit moment when I found out that I got the grant where I’m like, ‘Okay, am I actually doing this?’”

She called her parents.

“I was like, ‘Guys, do I do this?’”


“But it kind of was like the universe handed me the opportunity,” Maja says, “and you’ve got to say yes.”

So she said yes.

In an early call with her Burning Man artist liaison, Maja was honest about how new this all felt.

“I’m going to be completely honest here,” she told them. “I don’t call myself an artist.”

The response stayed with her.

“The liason said, ‘We want you. We know who you are, we know what you’re proposing, and what this is… we are willing to give you this grant because we believe in your idea, and Burning Man is an experiment.’”

    Then came the line.

    "We invite you to fail."

*Of course not without engineering, without planning, contracts, Leave No Trace, or the very real responsibility of building something in a desert environment…

But as an invitation to try something beyond the edge of what you already know how to do.

“That’s what the whole point of Burning Man is,” Maja says.

“You put all this energy into building something that’s so temporary,” Maja says, “and to go through that roller coaster of sometimes blood, but mostly sweat and tears, and then to have it be destroyed sometimes, have it burn, or just not go according to plan, and you have to adapt and you have to overcome.”

A Little Slice of Aotearoa in Black Rock City

Headwaters may be going to Burning Man, but it isn’t leaving New Zealand behind.

“We’re stoked to be able to represent New Zealand on the map.”

“At the beginning we were like, oh, if we fundraise enough, maybe we can bring the materials back to New Zealand,” she says. “And while I don’t think that we realistically can fundraise enough, it’s definitely all skills that are going into making us all the more suited to be able to try to bring more art to Kiwiburn and to Aotearoa.”

The Honoraria grant gets Headwaters part of the way there.

The rest comes down to community.

And brackets.

Somewhere between engineering and prayer, there is a bracket.

What Comes Home

“If somebody contributes to Headwaters today, what they’re doing is helping us bring a piece out there that’s going to hopefully reach hundreds of people,” she says.

“And the way I want it to reach them is to kind of give them a space to reflect and take a little bit deeper within themselves on wherever they’re at in their life, whatever challenges they’re facing.”

“There’s all this chaos around us, but what do they want to get from the experience that’s going to allow them to go back into the default world, a better person and a better version of themselves.”

No one is pretending times are easy. 

Nobody has a secret art budget hiding under the mattress.

But burn culture has always made room for the strange, generous, wildly impractical things that captivate us. 

The excuse to stop.

To wonder.

And maybe just as importantly,

you’re backing the kind of artist who comes home with more skills,

more confidence, and more dreams for what might one day appear in a paddock near us.

Special thanks to Shelley Watson, our Burning Man regional contact, for liaising!