Above & Below

Lead Artist:
Sean Orlando

Design Engineering:
Figure13

Above & Below is a large-scale immersive art installation by Sean Orlando, debuting at Burning Man 2026 as an official Burning Man Honoraria project.

At the base of the installation is a furnished, dreamlike home filled with objects, stories, and mysteries. Rooms are layered with artifacts, maps, photographs, and fragments of narrative, clues waiting to be noticed and stories waiting to be assembled. From there, a climb upward leads to a hidden space in the sky: a glowing Victorian cottage suspended 40 feet above the playa. Inside, find a place to pause, gather, and look outward across the desert and into the stars.

Connecting these two worlds is the beanstalk itself – a winding, climbable structure that transforms a familiar fairytale image into a monumental, engineered form. 

Above & Below invites participants into a world that is both familiar and strange: a journey from the intimate to the expansive, from memory to imagination.

Above & Below draws from stories as old as the beanstalk and the house in the clouds, connecting memory, imagination, and invention. It reflects a belief that the spaces we build can hold meaning, and that structure itself can become a place of wonder, discovery, and shared experience. Part home, part machine, part dream, the work continues Sean Orlando’s exploration of large-scale immersive sculpture and story-driven environments designed to invite curiosity and connection.

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