Northern Spark 2017 Open Call – Little Mekong, Little Africa, West Bank

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Northern Spark 2017 Open Call — Little Mekong, Little Africa, West Bank

Application Deadline: Monday, January 16th, 2017 at 9pm CST

Northern Spark: Climate Chaos | Climate Rising, will be held the night of June 10th, 2017 along the LRT Green Line from sunset to sunrise, 8:59 pm-5:26 am. 

This open call is for night-long artworks themed around Climate Chaos | Climate Rising in any artistic medium by artists of color and indigenous artists who have a cultural connection to the following communities: Cedar-Riverside Neighborhood (West Bank Station), Little Africa District (Snelling Station), and Little Mekong District (Western Station). 

To view our complete list of artist open calls, please visit our Artist Opportunities page.

The proposals submitted through this application will be juried by Northern Spark’s 2017 Program Council. Please read below for more details.  

Submission form

The link to our online submissions form will be posted here, as well as on our Artist Opportunities page, soon. 

Read below for more information.

Workshops 

Workshops for artists interested in submitting proposals for this call will include information on climate change and a walk through the open call process with tips for more successful submissions. Workshops will be located in each each district. Each workshop will be very similar; artists are encouraged to attend any workshop that works with their schedule. 

Workshop Dates:

Little Africa District: African Economic Development Solutions (AEDS) November 2nd, 5:30pm-8:30pm.

Little Mekong District: Asian Economic Development Association (AEDA) November 9th, 5:30pm-8:30pm. 

West Bank / Cedar-Riverside Neighborhood: West Bank Business Association (WBBA) November 14th, 6pm-8pm.

General Info Sessions about all of the Northern Spark Open Calls will be held at the Soap Factory, 514 2nd Ave SE, Minneapolis on:

Tuesday, December 13th 7-8:30pm

Thursday, January 5th 7-8:30pm

Please SIGN-UP at the link below for updates on locations and all other information. 
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Eligibility

This call is for artists of color and indigenous artists working individually or in collectives who have a cultural connection to one or more of the three communities described above. In the application, artists are asked to describe their “cultural connection” and why/how it is meaningful in their own words. Artists do not have to live in or near the three neighborhoods. Emerging artists are encouraged to apply. 

Some examples of cultural connections: 

  • I am Hmong; Little Mekong is the heart of the Hmong community. 
  • I go to a mosque / church / temple in this community. 
  • This neighborhood is where I see and hear my native language spoken.
  • My grandmother grew up in Rondo; this neighborhood is where I see my cultural heritage reflected 
  • As an indigenous person, this is my homeland and the theme of water is very important to me and my work. 

Artists who live outside of the Twin Cities are eligible to participate, but there is no additional funding available for travel. 

Key Criteria 

Northern Spark’s 2017 theme Climate Chaos |Climate Rising addresses climate change. More information about the theme is here. Every project proposal must broadly relate to the effects of climate change.

In addition to climate change, the Festival is a dynamic, busy, one-night event that takes place primarily outdoors in spaces such as parking lots, building facades, sidewalks and green spaces. Artists have several factors to consider. The Program Council will look at the following factors in their project selection. 

  • Climate Theme. How does your project relate to climate change and one or more of the sub-themes: move, nourish, interconnect, perceive, act?
  • Sustainability. What materials will you use to create your project? Are they recyclable and or non-toxic? Do you use renewable energy sources? We encourage artists to consider their carbon footprint and potential waste while conceiving of, creating and implementing their project.
  • Geographic Focus and Themes: Where do you propose your project happens? Consider the cultural context of each neighborhood. Please click here <link to neighborhoods> for more information. 
  • Artistic quality. The proposed work must be an original piece by the artist in any medium or multidisciplinary. It can be serious or funny, spectacular or intimate, or any combination thereof. Works that are commercialized or are intended to sell a product will be not be considered. 
  • Participatory. How will people interact with your project? Not all projects need to have a direct audience participation component, but our goal is that a significant percentage will. Participation can also be passive such as following dancers moving through space or participatory data visualization. 
  • Duration. One of the distinctive aspects of Northern Spark is its 8-hour duration. Does your project fill this time? How?
  • Nighttime. How will your project operate at night? How will people see your work?  
  • Safety. The festival provides security, but please consider the safety of your audience, yourself and the artwork itself. 
  • Crowded. Thousands of people attend Northern Spark in 8+ hours. Depending on the location of your project, there will likely be very large crowds to appreciate it. How does your proposal account for this?
  • Accessible. As a public arts event, there will be a broad audience that has a range of arts knowledge from novice to seasoned practitioner. The audience moves from project to project frequently. How will your project be understood by the casual observer? 
  • Feasibility. Northern Spark is one night. You only have 519 minutes. Installation generally takes place the same day and deinstallation the next morning. Describe how your project is feasible to set up and take down in 24 hours. 
  • Sound. City ordinances prohibit in most amplified sound in outdoor spaces after 10 pm. 
  • Legal. Projects must meet all necessary city laws, ordinances, and codes. Extensive research about city codes is not necessary for the application. Festival staff will help with these questions after projects are selected. 

Northern Lights.mn will assist and facilitate permitting, electricity, permissions, etc, but artists are responsible for the creation, production and execution of their project.

Budget

For this call, we will be funding projects with a range of budgets in the following amounts: $1,000, $3,000 or $6,000. If your project can only be successful with more funding, please state your case. Very few projects, if any, will be funded with a larger budget. Budgets should include everything necessary to present the project from construction to installation and artist fees. NL will provide electricity and standard permitting, although some elements such as fire and food may have additional permitting costs.

Artwork in any medium 

We invite you to propose a project in any medium that is sited/performed in public spaces (excluding trains and train platforms) that will last for one night. Northern Spark is a night for exploration and discovery. We encourage you to propose projects that put your work into the city’s nooks, crannies, and surfaces, and take advantage of an 8-hour duration. 

Examples of past projects from last year and earlier can be found on our Flickr pages and include:

  • An all night community dance, Census
  • Low-tech participatory game, Seed-Saving Bingo
  • Storytellling and singing:Blessing of the Boats and Water Quality Sing Along
  • Participatory graffiti / wall painting: Underpass of the Eyes of Freedom 
  • Dance procession and sculpture: Ananya Dance Theater
  • Quilting and star gazing
  • A Climate Carnival
  • Pickled dandelions for Making the Best of It
  • A Disco Roller Printing Party
  • Giant projections
  • Artist-designed engagement bikes
  • Games

Application materials

The application process is entirely online. Applicants are required to submit:

  • Primary contact information
  • A brief bio and relevant experience (max 1 page for each primary artist)
  • Brief statement on cultural connection to focus area where project is proposed 
  • Project concept (no more than 2 pages), including how the project relates to the effects of climate change and where it may be sited and consideration for each neighborhood (read more here ). 
  • Supporting materials that help us understand better your proposal and that it is feasible. This can range from a sketch on a napkin to CAD drawings, from a photo with a drawing superimposed to a video flythrough. If there is a technical component to the project, make sure to explain it. To the extent possible, give us a sense of the size and footprint of the project. Are you looking for a 10’ wall or a 100’ wall? If you have a specific site in mind, state it. Otherwise, what are the characteristics you are looking for, which are important to the project?
  • Images, video or audio files.  We ask for up to 10 images and 1 video or audio of past, preferably related work. 
  • A budget for the total amount you’re requesting for your project. (max 1 page) Note:. We will not be evaluating whether you have the best price for the right amount of materials; we want to see that the major budget needs are reasonable. Some examples of budget(s) are here.

A sample application with each of these elements will be available soon. 

Selection

These calls will be juried and selected by the Northern Spark Program Council with Northern Lights.mn, which reserves the right to request additional material and information after the proposal deadline, and to reject any and all proposals received.

Timing and Deadlines

Proposals must be submitted by 9 pm CST on Monday, January 16th The link to our online submissions form will be posted here, as well as on our Artist Opportunities page, soon. Submit your proposal here.

Selected projects will be notified in February by Friday, February 10th

General Timeline:

October 13th: Open Calls Announced

November 4, 9, 14: Open Call Workshops (optional)

December 13th: First Info Session (optional)

January 5th, 2017: Second Info Session (optional)

January 16th at 9PM CST: Application Deadline

Early February: Artists notified 

March: Project descriptions due to Northern Lights.mn

April: Production

May: Project Testing

June 10th (8:59pm-5:26am): Northern Spark 2017 

June 11th (morning): Projects dismantled and removed from site

More Information 

Geographic Focus and Themes

Here is more information about the neighborhoods of focus in this open call. 

Artists are encouraged to consider the descriptions provided when applying for this call. 

Cedar – Riverside Neighborhood (West Bank)

The neighborhood is a diverse community on the edge of downtown Minneapolis. Bordered by the Mississippi River, I94, and I35W and with access to both Green and Blue Line lightrail, the district features bars, theaters, restaurants, educational institutions, parks, residential buildings, community centers, and a variety of nonprofits. West Bank Business Association (WBBA) is Northern Spark’s core partner in this neighborhood, with participation from other organizations. 

When developing a proposal sited at Cedar-Riverside (West Bank), please consider that Cedar-Riverside (West Bank) is home to a majority Muslim residential population, many of whom will be observing Ramadan at the time of Northern Spark. 

Little Africa District

Little Africa is a business, arts and culture district centered on Snelling Avenue in the Hamline-Midway neighborhood. It begins at University & Snelling, stretching down Snelling until Minnehaha Ave, and includes African restaurants in nearby parts of St. Paul, and two other nodes as well (throughout Minneapolis, Brooklyn Park/Center). It includes at least 20 West and East African businesses on Snelling alone, celebrating the diversity of African cultures through public arts events, murals, and the annual summertime Little Africa festival. Northern Spark’s core partner is African Economic Development Solutions (AEDS), with participation from other organizations. 

When developing a proposal to be sited at Little Africa, please consider the themes of the district: the experience of African immigrants and people of African heritage and movement and migration as they relate to climate issues.

Little Mekong District

Little Mekong is the Asian business and cultural district in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Located between Mackubin and Galtier streets along University Avenue, the district boasts a diversity of cultures, top rated restaurants and unique shopping experiences. The neighborhoods around Little Mekong include Frogtown and Summit-University. Visitors come to Little Mekong to experience the unique culture and flavors of Southeast Asia. Northern Spark’s core partner is Asian Economic Development Association (AEDA), with participation from other organizations.

The district is known for the Little Mekong Night Market, an annual event that will take place on the same night as Northern Spark this year.

The 2017 Little Mekong Night Market will have a thematic focus on water. Water is seen as a connector, and the district’s name derives from the Mekong River, which flows from China through Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia, connecting the cultures of Southeast Asia. Water is sacred to many of these cultures, but can also remind other SE Asian communities of struggle and war.

When developing a proposal to be sited at Little Mekong, artists are encouraged to explore the social and cultural context of water.

What Is Northern Spark?

Northern Spark is a one-night, all-night participatory arts festival taking place on Saturday, June 10th, 2017 from 8:59 pm – 5:26 am. During Northern Spark, tens of thousands of people gather throughout the city to explore giant video projections, play in temporary installations in the streets, and enjoy experimental performances in green spaces and under bridges. From dusk to dawn, the city surprises you: friendly crowds, glowing groups of cyclists, an unexpected path through the urban landscape, the magic of sunrise after a night of amazing art and experiences. More information: 

Where Is Northern Spark 2017?

Northern Spark 2017 will take place in neighborhoods along the LRT Green Line spanning Minneapolis and St. Paul. 

What is the Northern Spark Program Council?

The Program Council is a group of 9 artists connected to communities on the Green Line where Northern Spark core programming will take place. They advise Northern Spark staff on the open call process, jury artist projects, and encourage neighborhood engagement. 

Northern Spark is committed to engaging greater participation from cultural communities along the Green Line by working with artists from those communities. Our goal is to align with and support the cultural and economic development efforts of our organizational partners: African Economic Development Solutions, Asian Economic Development Association and West Bank Business Association.  

What Is Climate Chaos | Climate Rising?

Climate Chaos | Climate Rising is the overarching theme for all of Northern Lights.mn’s programming from June 2016 to June 2017. 

You can find out more about the specifics of the theme here, but at its core it is about artists’ responses to the effects of climate change on everything from our backyard gardens to patterns of migration. Climate change is about C02 in the atmosphere and ocean acidification, but it is about so much more than the science. It is also about the way resource use in the global north effects the global south, which relates directly to complex issues of power and privilege. 

Sometimes the enormity of climate change seems overwhelming. Yes, facts are necessary to understand how and why this is happening, but it is culture that changes people’s behavior in the world. Simply put, changing our cultural environment is critical to saving our physical environment. 

Artists are the makers and the storytellers and the questioners who can help us understand the consequences of climate change, and who, ultimately, challenge us to think about and act upon what it means to be human.

We are excited to hear your ideas, big and small, about the effects of climate change in your community and new ways to understand its consequences and possibilities for action, individually and together.

Frequently Asked Questions 

What kind of information do you want to see included in my supporting materials?

The information we want to see in your supporting materials are things like equipment needed, dimensions of artworks or necessary spaces, site drawings with measurements, any special structures or features that would be needed, etc. Basically, anything that will help us get a sense of how your project would physically fit into the landscape of the festival, and what the major physical components are.

Does my proposal need to suggest/request a specific site?

For the Little Mekong, Little Africa, West Bank call, your proposal does not have to include a specific location, but at a minimum it should include the type of space (ex., a vertical wall, a parking lot, a dark corner, grassy surface) that would be appropriate for your project.

My project will only last one hour, and it will not be repeated. Can I still submit a proposal?

We are mainly looking for projects that will last for the duration of the night.

I don’t need funding for my project / I can provide all the funding for my project, and I would like to present it at Northern Spark. What is the process I should follow?

All proposals for projects should be submitted through the open call submissions form by the January 16th deadline so they can be sent to the jury. Each project is juried through the same process, regardless of its funding needs.  It’s fine to have a budget anywhere between $0 and the maximum for each category.

Is there a set number of projects that will be accepted?

No, there is not a set number of projects that will be accepted.

I live in a country that is not the United States, so my phone number doesn’t fit into the submission form correctly.

No problem. Email submissions@northern.lights.mn

I’m not interested in presenting a project, but I really want to be a part of this festival. How can I get involved?

You can volunteer! We love our volunteers. Email volunteers@northern.lights.mn for more information.

What should I do if I don’t see my question listed in these FAQ’s?

E-mail us at submissions@northern.lights.mn with any additional questions. Or visit our Frequently Asked Questions page.

Northern Lights.mn Newsletter – November

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A Message From Our Staff

Dear Reader,

You could say that Tuesday night we experienced the political equivalent of a 1,000 year storm, a storm that seemed to come out of nowhere but that in reality is something we made. It is dismaying to contemplate a government that acts as if climate change is a hoax when we can see it in our everyday lives – a longer growing season, first frost, last bloom, invasive species overwintering. We can lament what is happening politically and environmentally – and we do – but we must also consider when to resist, how to mitigate the effects, adapt to the reality of the situation, and, frankly, Make the Best of It.

This is why artists are so important. They – you – help us all think and see and feel differently about the world we are in. And inspire us to change. But while individual action is critical to combatting climate change, it will never be enough. We need to hack systemically and act together to create a hopeful chorus of collective action. It’s not just the climate that is rising, we are.

–Northern Spark 2017 staff
Molly Balcom Raleigh, Leslie Barlow, Dawn Bentley, Steve Dietz, Emily Janisch, Ady Olson, Sarah Peters, Matthew Rezac, Sara Shives, Tyler Stefanich, Elle Thoni, Teeko Yang

AAA: Emergent Ecologies November 17th

Tokyo Skytree by IQRemix [Flickr] is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

AAA: Emergent Ecologies
November 17th, 7pm
Fulton Taproom
414 6th Ave N, Minneapolis
Facebook event

On November 17th join Eben Kirksey, author of Emergent Ecologies, for a conversation about how we can reject climate change doomsday scenarios and instead find possibilities in the symbiotic associations of opportunistic plants, animals, and microbes now flourishing in unexpected places. Emergent Ecologies uses artwork and contemporary philosophy to illustrate hopeful opportunities and reframe key problems in conservation biology such as invasive species, extinction, environmental management, and reforestation.

Emergent Ecologies is a part of our monthly Anthropocene Awareness Association meetup series. AAA is a sometimes club, sometimes support group, always happy hour to discuss issues related to the core ideas of Climate Chaos | Climate Rising, led by invited speakers from various related fields in art, science and their intertwinings.

AAA: Words for a Warming Planet November 30th

Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, courtesy of the artist

AAA: Words for a Warming Planet
November 30th, 7pm
All My Relations Gallery
1414 E Franklin Ave, Minneapolis
Facebook event

How does poetry give voice to climate change?

Northern Lights.mn and Climate Generation: A Will Steger Legacy is proud to present a special evening of poetry and discussion on that very topic. Marshall Islands spoken word artist Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner will perform poems inspired by her people’s experience of climate change: rising tides, forced migration and adaptation. Twin Cities poets will join Kathy to share their words and then discuss ways to represent the complex issue of climate change through the creative word. As with all AAA gatherings, this event is free and open to the public.

Water Quality Support Group and Dance Party November 19th

Plotform, Water Quality Sing-Along, Mill Ruins Park, Northern Spark 2016. Photo: Max Haynes.

Water Support Group & Dance Party
Saturday, November 19th at 7pm
Water Bar and Public Studio
2516 Central Ave NE, Minneapolis, MN 55418
Facebook Event

Plotform, the artist collective behind the 2016 Northern Spark project Water Quality Sing-Along, will be hosting a Water Support Group followed by a dance party at the Water Bar in Minneapolis. The event will feature an evening of storytellers who will share personal short stories of nitrate-affected water that highlight water crisis, failure, challenge, solution, and more. The goal: to paint a rich and varied picture of all of the ways that we are agents as well as victims of the nutrient pollution that impacts the health of freshwater throughout the state. Come and hear stories, drink water and dance!

November’s Northern Spark Book Club

Hennepin County Library staff with Jon Mac Cole, Olli Johnson, David Pisa, Nico Swenson, Michael Torsch, and Rhiana Yazzie, The Night Library, Northern Spark 2016. Photo: Jayme Halbritter.

Sci-Fi Book Club
November 19th, 12:30 p.m.
Sheridan Meeting Room – Pierre Bottineau Library
Facebook event information here

Join us on Saturday, November 19th at 12:30pm, for our third and final Northern Spark Book Club meet up! This fall three library book clubs continue to investigate the 2016-2017 Northern Spark theme of Climate Chaos, Climate Rising, which was explored in detail at The Night Library. In this continued partnership, the book clubs discuss climate change in literature as it relates to the books they have selected.

November’s selection is the novel Dune by Frank Herbert.
“Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of the boy Paul Atreides, who would become the mysterious man known as Muad’Dib. He would avenge the traitorous plot against his noble family–and would bring to fruition humankind’s most ancient and unattainable dream.”–Dune, Frank Herbert

 

Give to the Max Day – Schedule Your Gift

You know that Northern Lights.mn is a catalyst for innovation and creativity in public space — we support artists working on the frontiers of technology and new media, encouraging them to speak to issues relevant to our time, including global climate change.

But you may NOT know about Give to the Max Day: it’s our final goal on the road to realizing the Climate Chaos | Climate Rising curatorial project at Northern Spark 2017. We’re asking for at least 75 people to support Northern Lights.mn on Thursday, November 17 for Give to the Max Day.

You can contribute $40, $100, or whatever you’d like — Every dollar you contribute supports climate-focused artist projects at our biggest festival yet — Northern Spark 2017.

Please put Northern Lights.mn on your Give to the Max Day list and consider scheduling your gift now!

Deadline approaching for the Creative City Challenge

Christopher Lutter, Heid E. Erdrich, Coal Dorius, Kim Ford, Paul Tinetti, Karl Stoerzinger, and Ian Knodel, Wolf and Moose — 2016 Creative City Challenge winner, Northern Spark 2016. Photo: Jayme Halbritter.

The deadline for the fifth annual Creative City Challenge has been extended and we are accepting entries now through December 5 based on the theme Climate Chaos | Climate Rising.

The Creative City Challenge is a competition for Minnesota-resident architects, landscape architects, urban designers, planners, engineers, scientists, artists, students and individuals of all backgrounds to create and install a temporary, destination artwork, which acts as a sociable and participatory platform for 2 months of onsite programming. The Commons is located at 521 East 4th Street. across from the US Bank Stadium. The winning Creative City Challenge proposal will receive a $50,000 fee to execute the project.

The deadline for proposals is December 5. You can view the Creative City Challenge call, along with our other artist open calls, on our Artist Opportunities page.

Our Creative City Challenge Info Session is scheduled for next week!
Tuesday, November 15th, 6 – 7:30pm
The Soap Factory
514 2nd St SE, Minneapolis

AOV9

Jessica R. Henderson, here i am am i here, AOV7 fellowship. Photo: Rik Sferra

We are pleased to announce a call for a ninth round of Art(ists) on the Verge commissions (AOV9), which will take place from March 2017 – April 2018.

Art(ists) On the Verge is an intensive, mentor-based fellowship program for 5 Minnesota-based, emerging artists or artist groups working experimentally at the intersection of art, technology, and digital culture with a focus on network-based practices that are interactive and/or participatory. Links to past AOV programs and fellows’ work can be found here.

We will be holding two information sessions (optional) for this call on Tuesday December 13th 6-7pm and Thursday January 5th 6-7pm at the Soap Factory, 514 2nd St SE in Minneapolis.

Find out more about application criteria and read the call here.
Deadline:  Monday, January 16, 2016, 9:30pm, CST.

AOV is generously supported by the Jerome Foundation.

Northern Spark 2017 Artist Opportunities

Yes, Let’s!, Climate Carnival, Northern Spark 2016. Photo: Dusty Hoskovec.

Our artist calls for Northern Spark 2017 are now open for submissions! On the night of June 10th, the Light Rail Green Line will become the creative spine of the festival, uniting neighborhoods in Minneapolis and Saint Paul under the banner of Climate Chaos | Climate Rising. We are now seeking artists proposals for multiple calls, so be sure to check our Artist Opportunities page for the full list.

We encourage you to join us at one of our upcoming workshops or info sessions. We’ll dive into the details of the open calls, answer any questions, and have information about specific sites available.

– Mon, November 14th 6pm-8pm West Bank / Cedar Riverside Open Call  Brian Coyle: 420 15th Ave. S, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55454 – Facebook event

– Tues, November 15th, 6 pm-7:30pm Creative City Challenge  Northern Lights.mn office: The Soap Factory, 514 2nd St SE, Minneapolis – Facebook event

– Tues, December 13th 7-8:30pm. For Artworks in Any Medium, Lowertown, and other opportunities Northern Lights.mn office: The Soap Factory, 514 2nd St SE, Minneapolis – Facebook event

– Thurs, January 5th 7-8:30pm. For Artworks in Any Medium, Lowertown, and other opportunities  Northern Lights.mn office: The Soap Factory, 514 2nd St SE, Minneapolis- Facebook event

 

Climate Change in Your Neighborhood

Annie Griffiths, Aerial View of the Colorado River Delta in Baja, California

“By the time it reaches the Sea of Cortez, the mighty Colorado River has been siphoned off by so many sources that it’s little more than a trickle.” –Annie Griffiths

Annie Griffiths is a photographer for National Geographic and the executive director/founder of @rippleeffectimages. Help a Woman | Help the Planet

View more photographs on our Neighborhood Climate Change tumblr.

We’re Hiring!

Are you someone who loves to get people excited about volunteering? Join our team! We’re looking for a Volunteer Coordinator to recruit, schedule and train Northern Spark festival volunteers. Find out more information here. Applications are due Monday, November 21.

 

In The News

Congratulations 2016 Upper Midwest Emmy® recipients, including our friends over at The Lowertown Line, who won an award for their Twin Cities PBS episode featuring Cloud Cult at Northern Spark 2015! More details on the event and winners here.

 

Projects We Like

Dream Disaster: The sinking ship of love in the anthropocene is a performance and sales pitch for a destination wedding that explores the contradictions of capitalist consumption in an age of environmental collapse. This exhibition at the Soap Factory runs Nov. 12 – Dec. 18, with an opening reception and performance Nov 12, 7-11pm. Email Joni if you’re interested in being a volunteer performer: joni@soapfactory.org

 

Northern Lights.mn mini Newsletter – Even More Artist Opportunities!

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Announcing the Fifth Annual Creative City Challenge

Christopher Lutter, Heid E. Erdrich, Coal Dorius, Kim Ford, Paul Tinetti, Karl Stoerzinger, and Ian Knodel, Wolf and Moose — 2016 Creative City Challenge winner. Photo: Jayme Halbritter.

The Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy Program of the City of Minneapolis in collaboration with The Commons and Northern Lights.mn and the Northern Spark festival, announce the fifth annual Creative City Challenge based on the theme Climate Chaos | Climate Rising.

The Creative City Challenge is conceived as a showcase for local creative talent, Minneapolis community identities and a tangible symbol of the complex narratives that make up the many stories within our urban landscape. The Challenge is a competition for Minnesota-resident architects, landscape architects, urban designers, planners, engineers, scientists, artists, students and individuals of all backgrounds to create and install a temporary, destination artwork, which acts as a sociable and participatory platform for 2 months of onsite programming. The Commons is located at 521 East 4th Street. across from the US Bank Stadium. The winning Creative City Challenge proposal will receive a $50,000 commission to execute the project.

“Creative City Challenge has established itself over the past four years as an inspiring example of Minneapolis artists’ innovative spirit and talent,” said Mayor Betsy Hodges. “Heading into the fifth year, I’m excited to see what the creative people of Minneapolis come up with this time.”

Entries are being accepted now through November 28, 2016. You can view the Creative City Challenge call, along with our other artist open calls, on our Artist Opportunities page.

Also – Save the Date for our Creative City Challenge Info Session!
Tuesday, November 15th, 6 – 7:30pm
The Soap Factory
514 2nd St SE, Minneapolis

Climate Rising Collaboration Open Call

Robin Garwood, Wishing Well, Northern Spark 2016. Photo: Max Haynes.

Northern Lights.mn is excited to announce that we are now seeking artist proposals for the Climate Rising Collaboration projects for Northern Spark 2017 on June 10th. For this opportunity, artists will team up with one of 6 Partner Organizations to address a local, national or global climate change issue related to their specific mission through the creation and presentation of a Northern Spark project. For more information about this opportunity, and to view our complete list of open calls, please visit our Artist Opportunities page.

Additional Artist Open Calls for Northern Spark 2017

Robin Schwartzman and Desiree Moore, Minnesotan Ice, Northern Spark 2016. Photo: Dusty Hoskovec.

In case you missed our newsletter a couple weeks ago, our artist open calls for Northern Spark 2017 are now live!

The night of June 10th, the Light Rail Green Line will become the creative spine of the festival, uniting neighborhoods in Minneapolis and Saint Paul under the banner of Climate Chaos | Climate Rising. We are now seeking artists proposals for multiple calls, so be sure to check our Artist Opportunities page for the full list.

Upcoming Workshops / Info Sessions for Open Calls

Illuminated Reef Collective, The Illuminated Reef, Northern Spark 2016. Photo: Max Haynes.

Planning to submit to one of our artist open calls? We encourage you to join us at one of our upcoming workshops or info sessions. We’ll dive into the details of the open calls, answer any questions, and have information about specific sites available.

For West Bank, Little Africa and Little Mekong Open Calls:

– Wed, November 2nd, 5:30pm-8:30pm in Little Africa district – Facebook event
– Wed, November 9th, 5:30pm-8:30pm in Little Mekong District – Facebook event
– Mon, November 14th 6pm-8pm in West Bank / Cedar Riverside – Facebook event

For updates on locations, sign up here.

– Tues, November 15th, 6 pm-7:30pm Creative City Challenge Northern Lights.mn office: The Soap Factory, 514 2nd St SE, Minneapolis – Facebook event

– Tues, December 13th 7-8:30pm. For Artworks in Any Medium, Lowertown, and other opportunities Northern Lights.mn office: The Soap Factory, 514 2nd St SE, Minneapolis – Facebook event

– Thurs, January 5th 7-8:30pm. For Artworks in Any Medium, Lowertown, and other opportunities  Northern Lights.mn office: The Soap Factory, 514 2nd St SE, Minneapolis – Facebook event

We’re Hiring!

Are you a people person who loves to get people excited about volunteering? Join our team! We’re looking for a Volunteer Coordinator to recruit, schedule and train Northern Spark festival volunteers. Find out more information here. Applications are due Monday, November 21.

Climate Change in your Neighborhood

Areca Roe, Wandering (Self as Maple), 2016

“Climate change is shifting the borders of biomes, necessitating the movement of plants and trees as well. These trees can’t move and adapt as quickly to change as creatures with legs, but they still manage to migrate slowly via their offspring. Many tree species in my state of Minnesota, such as maples trees, are already shifting their ranges due to climate change. In this photo I imagine a maple tree uprooting itself, traveling to a new range and plopping down, then taking root in a more comfortable clime.” –Areca Roe

What are the signs of climate change that you notice when you are riding your bike to the grocery store or walking your dog in the evening or in your garden out your back door or that place you’ve always vacationed for the last decade? What are the steps your friends are taking to limit their carbon footprint? What are some of the actions you see neighborhood organizations taking to mitigate climate change?

We invite you to send us your photographs of climate change in your neighborhood. We will select the best to join with the other photographers already invited to participate.

Send the following to: NCC@northern.lights.mn

  • Image

  • Artist name, Title, Date

  • Caption/text

  • One sentence “bio.”

  • Your Instagram account or website

All photographs will be published with a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

 

Northern Lights.mn Newsletter – October

Written by

October AAA: What is the Anthropocene?

Photo: Beyond Neon, Worried Snow Monkey, [Flickr] is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

AAA: What is the Anthropocene?
Wednesday, October 19th, 7-8pm
Fulton Taproom
414 6th Ave N, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
Facebook event

Perhaps you’ve heard of our new club AAA: Anthropocene Awareness Association, and maybe you’ve been at a party and overheard someone using the descriptor “anthropogenic.” (Or you yourself have boldly spoken of such.) What do these terms really mean?  What do we make of a new scientific era, who created this term and why, and use does it have in a broader understanding of our relationship to the rest of the world?

Toss back a Fulton brew and join the discussion with three area scholars who will share their take on the meaning — and value — of the anthropocene.

Matthew Tucker is a designer with a strong background in ecologically and culturally sensitive site design that is informed by the changing patterns and processes of place.

Roopali Padke’s research and teaching is at the nexus of environmental studies, international development and science and technology studies with current research on private and public development of water and energy resources.

Kyungsoo Yoo studies genesis of soils. His research goal is to understand interactions among minerals, organic matter, and organisms as they move in soils and across landscapes and to understand how these interactions have been altered by humans.

Jessica Hellman directs the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota and researches global change ecology and climate adaptation.

Become a member of AAA and receive your bonafide club patch! Available along with a Fulton beer of your choice for only $10 at the event.

Save the Date for the next meeting of AAA: November 17th, 7 pm with Eben Kirksey, author of Emergent Ecologies.

Announcing Artist Opportunities for Northern Spark 2017

Cedarside 2016 Artists with Muna Ahmed, Blessing the Boats. Photo: Dusty Hoskovec.

Northern Lights.mn is thrilled to announce the launch of our artist open calls for Northern Spark 2017. The festival, which will take place on Saturday, June 10th, will be the culmination of a full-year of urgent & imaginative programming around the theme of Climate Chaos | Climate Rising. The Light Rail Green Line will act as the creative spine of the festival, spanning US Bank Stadium in Downtown Minneapolis and CHS Field Stadium in Lowertown, Saint Paul. All along the Green Line, neighborhoods will light up with participatory art projects, weaving global questions about climate change into the fabric of community celebrations. Even trains themselves will be animated by artists throughout the night, making the entire festival experience feel like one unforgettable ride.

This year, we have several open calls ranging in medium and scale, and focusing on different communities. Please note that deadlines vary by call. Basic descriptions are listed below, to read our calls in full, please visit our website. Submissions links will also be posted there.

Open Call Categories:

Artworks in Any Medium – projects in any medium that relate to Climate Chaos | Climate Rising, to be presented at selected stations – due January 16th, 2017

West Bank, Little Africa and Little Mekong – projects in any medium by artists of color and indigenous artists with cultural connections to West Bank, Little Africa and Little Mekong neighborhoods – due January 16th, 2017

Lowertown – projects in any medium designed for sites in the Lowertown neighborhood – due January 16th, 2017

Stay tuned for more artist opportunities coming soon.
If you are planning on submitting a proposal and would like to receive relevant open call updates, please e-mail submissions@northern.lights.mn.

Northern Spark Workshops for Artists

Northern Lights.mn and our festival partners are conducting workshops for artists who are interested in submitting proposals to Northern Spark 2017 Climate Chaos | Climate Rising. Each workshop will include information on climate change and a walk through the open call process with tips for more successful artist submissions. Workshops will be located in the vicinity of our core partners’ business district.

Workshop dates:

– November 2nd, 5:30pm-8:30pm, Little Africa District: African Economic Development Solutions (AEDS)

– November 9th, 5:30pm-8:30pm, Little Mekong District: Asian Economic Development Association (AEDA)

– November 14th, 6pm-8pm, West Bank: Cedar-Riverside Neighborhood: West Bank Business Association (WBBA)

Please sign up here for updates on locations and additional information.

Northern Lights.mn is excited to welcome our first-ever Northern Spark 2017 Program Council!

When we received Knight Foundation support to site Northern Spark 2017 along the Green Line, Northern Lights.mn decided to work in a different way to plan the festival: we wanted to engage neighborhoods and cultural communities directly.

In the spirit of forging these new relationships, we’ve assembled Northern Spark’s first-ever Program Council, made up of 9 artists with cultural connections to neighborhoods on the Green Line where the festival programming will take place: West Bank, Little Africaand Little Mekong. Their role is to work with Northern Spark staff to shape the open call process, jury projects, and encourage greater participation and neighborhood engagement. We are incredibly lucky to work with, support, and partner with such great visionaries. Please find their brief bio and photos below, with more info here on our website.


Adan Dirie
Adan is a poet who writes in his native Somali language. He is an active member of his community and a full-time student. Connect with Adan on Facebook.


Sara Endalew
Sara was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and attended Addis Ababa University Fine Arts School with a degree in sculpture and painting. She has participated in several exhibition shows with various local and international institutions in Ethiopia. She moved to the U.S. in 2006 and has continued her artistic pursuits.


Graci Horne
Hapistinna Graci Horne, better known as Graci, was born and raised in MN. Her bands are the Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota people and Hunkpapa Lakota/Dakota people. She holds a degree in Museum Studies from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM and is an expert in exhibition design, planning, and curation, as well as educational programming. Connect with Graci at hgracihorne@gmail.com.


Filsan Ibrahim
Filsan is a environmentalist, community organizer, and an instigator for change. She hopes to use her voice to improve lives of those in her community, especially on the importance of being engaged in the entire process of democracy. Connect with Filsan on Facebook.


Pa Na Lor
Pa Na Lor is a storyteller working in an array of multimedia and experimental animation to tell her stories – grand or miniscule. Currently, she is creating an experimental animation through digital collaging, hand-drawn and paint-on-glass animation, printmaking and painting. She currently resides in Saint Paul, MN. Connect with Pa Na on Facebook.


Brittany Lynch
Brittany Lynch is a poet, TV/radio personality, actress, entrepreneur, creative consultant and community organizer. Star Tribune declared her one of the “Most Influential Black Young Leaders of the Twin Cities.” Her skills are truly limitless. Connect with Brittany through twitter @heymissbrit.


Sagirah Shahid
Sagirah Shahid is a poet by way of Minneapolis. She is a 2015-2016 winner of the Loft Literary Center’s Mentor Series Award in poetry. Sagirah’s work has been published widely, including in Mizna, Alyss, Qu and The Fem Literary Magazine. Sagirah is an editor at the Saint Paul Almanac and is currently at work writing her first book of poetry. Connect with Sagirah through twitter @sagirahs.


Aki Shibata-Pliner
Aki Shibata was born in Tokyo, Japan. She moved to the U.S. for her arts education, and graduated in 2007 with a BFA in Photography from the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul, MN. Shibata states that she “creates more places and ways to let people meet their peace.” Her artworks are an examination of her body and mind in public and gallery spaces. Connect with Aki through twitter @chibataki.


Ahmed Yusuf 
Ahmed is a writer and storyteller using his artistic work to highlight his community with his book Somalis in Minnesota, published by Minnesota Historical Society Press as part of the “People of Minnesota” series. He came to the U.S. in the late 1980s, and – despite not knowing his age – holds two degrees and is one of the Somali community’s most eloquent writers and representatives. Connect with Ahmed on his Facebook.

Northern Spark 2017 Partners Update

Let’s give a very warm welcome to our Presenting Partners for this year’s Northern Spark! Northern Spark actively engages with amazing organizations and institutions every year. Their programming contributions make the festival the vibrant night it has become.

We want to extend a special thanks to our core Green Line Neighborhood Partners:

Here are 2017’s Presenting Partners; stay tuned as the list grows!  If you are interested in partnering with Northern Spark, send a note to partnership@northern.lights.mn

Presenting Partners
Ananya Dance Theater, ArtSpace, Bedlam Theater, City of Minneapolis – Creative City Challenge, Hennepin County Library, MCAD Sustainability Design MA, Minnesota Interfaith Power and Light, Minnesota Museum of American Art, MN Sacred Harp Singers, Patrick’s Cabaret, Saint Paul Saints, Saint Paul Public Library, Southern Theater, Studio Sendero, Studio Z, Textile Center, Twin Cities Public Television, Union Depot, UW-Stout School of Art and Design, Weisman Art Museum, Minnesota Public Radio

Climate Rising Collaboration
Center for Energy and the Environment, Climate Generation, MN350, Conservation MN, Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, TakeAction Minnesota

Climate Change in your Neighborhood

Photo: Elin O’Hara Slavick, A persimmon tree in an exclusion zone / contaminated area near Iwate Village, Fukushima, 2015

“The fruit can not be harvested or eaten. An A-bombed persimmon tree in Nagasaki that survived the 1945 A-Bomb and still bears fruit, 2016. Both trees are damaged – one invisibly, the other dramatically – but both survived the invisible and deadly levels of radiation (from a bomb in 1945 and the nuclear accident at Dai’ichi in 2011).” – Elin O’ Hara Slavick

Elin O’Hara Slavick is a conceptual photographer focusing on the invisibility of radiation and all that is lost (and what remains) as a result of nuclear weapons, power and accidents.

See more photographs at the Neighborhood Climate Change tumblr.

 

Plotform to Host Water Support Group and Dance Party

Plotform, Water Quality Sing-Along, Mill Ruins Park, Northern Spark 2016. Photo: Max Haynes.

Water Support Group & Dance Party
Saturday, November 19th at 7pm
Water Bar and Public Studio
2516 Central Ave NE, Minneapolis, MN 55418

Plotform, the artist collective behind the 2016 Northern Spark project Water Quality Sing-Along, will be hosting a Water Quality Support Group followed by a dance party at the Water Bar in Minneapolis. The event will feature an evening of storytellers who will share personal short stories of nitrate-affected water that highlight water crisis, failure, challenge, solution, and more. The goal: to paint a rich and varied picture of all of the ways that we are agents as well as victims of the nutrient pollution that impacts the health of freshwater throughout the state. Come and hear stories, drink water and dance!

Projects We Like

– Hennepin County is currently seeking professional artists and technologists to volunteer to work with youth participants at What the Hack?, a one-day, free event creating opportunities for North Minneapolis youth ages 14 to 18 to learn, play and work with arts and technology. All are encouraged to join in sharing their passion and talent: Painters, programmers, inventors, illustrators, actors, sound, website and game designers, DJs, dancers, musicians, makers, 3D printers, and fashion and wearable tech designers. What the Hack? will take place Saturday, November 19, 2016 from 8:30 am to 5:00 pm at The Soap Factory. Interested? Contact Kelly Clausen with your availability and questions.

– INSTINT assembles an international roster of acclaimed creators to explore the intersection of art, technology and interaction. Located in New Orleans from January 22nd – 24th, INSTINT utitlizes presentations, discussions, workshops, show & tell, and social events, all to bring creators together in community and potential collaboration. Tickets are still available! Find out more information and register on their website.

Northern Lights.mn Newsletter – September

Written by

Feeling Overwhelmed about Climate Change? Join AAA: Anthropocene Awareness Association

Image: Holbergsgade Cyclists by Tony Webster [Flickr] is licensed under CC BY 2.0

We’ve entered the Anthropocene — a new planetary age when human activities exert a dominant influence on Earth’s geology and ecosystems.

As a way of exploring (and coping) with this reality, Northern Lights.mn invites you to join the AAA: Anthropocene Awareness Association. It’s a sometimes club, sometimes support group, always happy hour to discuss issues related to the core ideas of Climate Chaos | Climate Rising: adaptation, deep time, interconnection, migration, and many others.

Our inaugural gathering will take place at 7pm on September 30th in the Art Commons of the Janet Wallace Fine Arts Center at Macalester College in St. Paul, as part of their International Roundtable on Sustainability. The Roundtable includes projects from Northern Spark by Christine Baeumler (Climate Chaser), Marina Zurkow and Valentine Cadieux (Making the Best of It), Shanai Matteson (The Water Bar), John Kim (Phase Change), and Greg Fitz (A Bend in the River). The AAA event will feature Dr. Christie Manning in a panel called “In/Action: Bridging the Science and Art of Change,” which will talk about people’s psychological and behavioral responses towards climate change and sustainability.

A little more about our presenter:

Dr. Christie Manning is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and the Associate Director of the Educating Sustainability Ambassadors Program at Macalester College. Christie conducts yearly survey studies on Minnesotans’ attitudes toward sustainability and ecological behavior, collecting data at the State Fair in collaboration with fellow Psychologists at the University of St. Thomas.

Many thanks to our friends at Fulton Brewing for sponsoring!

Climate Reading

Our Climate Chaos | Climate Rising book clubs organized with Hennepin County Library launched earlier this month with a rousing discussion of Phillipe Squarzoni’s graphic novel Climate Changed: A Personal Journey Through the Science. Members of Nokomis Library’s graphic novel club generally agreed that the book was long on facts and short on story — falling into a common trap of over-focusing on science in a bid to change our behavior. Yet it did prompt a broader discussion on the morality, and the ethics of the decisions we make about our lives in regard to climate change.

Next month we’ll explore Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Flight Behavior, a story of climate and personal chaos as told through her intimate novel of personal journey and discovery, the intimacy of personal as told through characters in a rural Tennessee community. Check a copy out today and join us for the discussion on Thursday, October 13, 6:30pm at Oxboro Library.

IN Light IN

Jamie Pawlus, HAPPINESS. Photo: Hadley Fruits

On August 26th and 27th 27,000 people and over 2 dozen artists gathered along the banks of the canal in Downtown Indianapolis, IN, for IN Light IN, a two-night art festival in honor of the 100th anniversary of The Indianapolis Foundation. Northern Lights.mn co-presented the festival with the Central Indiana Community Foundation (CICF).

Artists from Indiana, Minnesota, California, Kentucky, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Montreal presented projects in public spaces during the nighttime. Audience members were projected live onto water screens (Luke Savisky, ST/x) and their images danced across buildings (Daily tous les jours, McLarena). They basked in the glow of neon lights (Jamie Pawlus, HAPPINESS) and illuminated sculptures (Lauren Zoll, Kitsch’n Lights; Anila Quayyum Agha, Alhambra Nights; Owens + Crawley, 2058: the first September without ice; PROJECTiONE, PRISMAtique; Aphidoidea, Droplet’s Formation II) and interacted with enormous projections onto cathedrals, churches, and office buildings (YesYesNo, Night Lights / Funky Forms; Tiffany Carbonneau & Susanna Crum, A Place In Time), among numerous other live performances, music, and artworks.

Minneapolis-based artists and friends of Northern Spark were part of the action: Piotr Szyhalski presented the premier of Geophone, a project composed of live-mixed and archival recordings heard through 20 speakers buried under the ground. Robin Schwartzman and RADAR Collective presented Barter Boat, an artifact exchange point that grew from Minnesotan Ice, which premiered at Northern Spark 2016. The Illuminated Reef Collective was back with The Illuminated Reef, a great hit at this Northern Spark this year.

The night was sticky, and the crowds were awed by the energy of the IN Light IN experience. We are thankful to Joanna Nixon and CICF for allowing us to help create two great nights full of wonder.

Climate Change in your Neighborhood

Photo: Giovanni Zaffagnini, Appennines, 2016

“The total absence of rain in the summer of 2015 has almost completely drained the water course, allowing kids to play with river stones and the photographer to access areas that are generally submerged.” – Giovanni Zaffagnini

What are the signs of climate change that you notice when you are riding your bike to the grocery store or walking your dog in the evening or in your garden out your back door or that place you’ve always vacationed for the last decade? What are the steps your friends are taking to limit their carbon footprint? What are some of the actions you see neighborhood organizations taking to mitigate climate change?

We invite you to be a part of the Neighborhood Climate Change tumblr and send us your photographs of climate change in your neighborhood. We will select the best to join with the other photographers already invited to participate.

Send the following to: to NCC@northern.lights.mn

– Image
– Artist name, Title, Date
– Caption/text
– One sentence “bio.”
– Your instagram account or website

All photographs will be published with a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

Presenting Partners Get On Board

We kicked off the festival-organizing season with an introductory meeting for Northern Spark Presenting Partners in early September hosted by Bedlam Theater. There are many ways to participate in Northern Spark as an arts, culture, or environmental-focused organization. For more info, contact partnership@northern.lights.mn

Northern Spark 2016 Report

MINN_LAB, Weather Report. Photo: Dusty Hoskovec

Remember your Northern Spark night back in June? We’ve compiled the best photos, stats, and your quotes from the festival into one sleek summary. Take a look at the report here.

 

In The News

An immense thank you to the Minnesota State Arts Board for awarding Northern Lights.mn an Arts Access Grant for Northern Spark 2017 along the LRT Green Line! Specifically, this grant will allow us to deepen our community engagement in three festival-featured neighborhoods: the West Bank in Minneapolis and Little Africa & Little Mekong in St. Paul. These are neighborhoods that, for generations, has been gateways for new Minnesotans, and to this day are teeming with cultural diversity and vibrance. Over the course of this year, we will create a Program Council, made up of a coalition of community stakeholders, to help us envision and enact what Northern Spark will look like in their neighborhoods. In the near future, we will also be putting out a call for arts projects specific to the West Bank, Little Africa and Little Mekong – stay tuned!
We would also like to offer exuberant congratulations to our friends and partners who were also awarded Arts Access Grants: The Cedar, Ananya Dance Theater, MSP Film Society, Minnesota Museum of American Art, and SooVAC.

Northern Lights.mn has received a Cultural STAR Grant from the City of Saint Paulto illuminate Lowertown with artists’ projects during Northern Spark 2017 along the Green Line.

INsite, a project by Luftwerk at the Farnsworth House in Plano, IL, that was commissioned by Northern Lights.mn, is covered in the Spring 2016 issue of Forum Journal in an article about Activating Historic Spaces. President + Artistic Director Steve Dietz is mentioned. Take a moment to read his captivating description of how INsite interacts with and highlights the features of the house.

Projects We Like

EDIT, a local nonprofit that empowers youth to promote equity, diversity, and inclusion, will present the Twin Cities Social Justice Arts Festival on November 5. They are currently seeking artists to participate in the festival in the areas of performance, art workshops, collaborative art stations, and films. Proposals are due TODAY, so get submit your application now.

 

Northern Lights.mn Newsletter – August

Written by

IN Light IN


Northern Lights.mn is heading to Indianapolis! Check out IN Light IN, a historic “100 year event” in Indianapolis, August 26 and 27 from 9 pm to 1 am.

From interactive projection mapping of the largest Scottish Rite cathedral in the US to projected documentation of the oldest African American church in Indianapolis. From shadow sculptures recalling sacred Islamic spaces to illuminated floating droplets and icebergs along the canals of Indianapolis. Dance the “McLarena”, listen to 20 buried geophones, and experience a 75-foot participatory water screen projection by Northern Spark 2015 standout Luke Savisky. See all these projects and more from over a dozen artists from around the US and Canada. Northern Lights.mn co-presents with the Central Indiana Community Foundation IN Light IN, a free, two-day interactive light festival in honor of the 100th anniversary of The Indianapolis Foundation.

There’s Still Time to See Wolf and Moose!

Wolf and Moose on Vimeo. Video: Hamil Griffin-Cassidy

Wolf and Moose, winner of the 2016 Creative City Challenge, has been on display at the Minneapolis Convention Center plaza since June’s Northern Spark Festival. The interactive sculptures of a Minnesota wolf and moose have been a hit, and they’re still open for visits through October 17. Be sure to see them both in daylight and at night to witness their lighting effects.

Take a look at more Wolf and Moose images on Flickr.

Wolf and Moose was created by Christopher Lutter, Heid E. Erdrich, Coal Dorius, Kim Ford, Paul Tinetti, Karl Stoerzinger, and Ian Knodel. Creative City Challenge is presented by Minneapolis Convention Center, the Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy Program of the City of Minneapolis, and Meet Minneapolis, Convention & Visitors Association, in collaboration with Northern Lights.mn.

AAA: Stay Tuned!

We’ve entered the Anthropocene — a new planetary age when human activities exert a dominant influence on Earth’s geology and ecosystems.

As a way of exploring (and/or coping) with this reality, Northern Lights.mn invites you to join AAA: Anthropocene Awareness Association, a sometimes club, sometimes support group, always happy hour to discuss issues related to the core ideas of Climate Chaos | Climate Rising:  adaptation, deep time, interconnection, migration, perception, consumption and many others.

Join us for discussion salons, field trips, literature readings, and other events as we work towards collective and individual discovery of what it means to be human in the era of climate change.

Stay tuned for upcoming programs starting in September.

Climatic Change in your Neighborhood?

Photo: Greg Kahn, Hoopersville, 2016

“Water spills onto Hoopers Island Road, in Hoopersville, Md. during high tide. The Eastern Shore of Maryland has a rate of sea level rise that is twice the global average. The results are high tides that wash out roads connecting communities, and land that is slowly disappearing in to the Chesapeake Bay, taking with it a historic way of life. According to estimates, many communities along the Eastern Shore will be underwater in the next century.” – Greg Kahn

What are the signs of climate change that you notice when you are riding your bike to the grocery store or walking your dog in the evening or in your garden out your back door or that place you’ve always vacationed for the last decade? What are the steps your friends are taking to limit their carbon footprint? What are some of the actions you see neighborhood organizations taking to mitigate climate change?

We invite you to send us your photographs of climate change in your neighborhood. We will select the best to join with the other photographers already invited to participate.

Send the following to: to NCC@northern.lights.mn

– Image
– Artist name, Title, Date
– Caption/text
– One sentence “bio.”
– Your Instagram account or website

All photographs will be published with a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

Keep up with our daily posts at Neighborhood Climate Change.

Northern Spark @ Summer 4Play

Yes, Lets!, Climate Carnival, Summer 4Play, Fort Snelling State Park, Photo: Leslie Barlow

On Saturday, July 30 Northern Lights.mn teamed up with Make It. MSP to bring back some of the most popular projects of Northern Spark 2016 to Summer 4Play, an afternoon at Fort Snelling State Park with the goal to connect native Minnesotans and new-comers alike with fun, seasonal related activities.

Projects we featured at Summer 4Play were: Christine Bauemler’s Backyard Phenology, Shawn McCann’s Live Chalk Drawing, Robin Schwartzman’s Minnesotan Ice, and Yes, Let’s! Climate Carnival.  Northern Spark @ Summer 4Play visitors cooled off by bartering for ice pops from the future, played climate-themed carnival games in the hopes to win their own seed bomb to take home, went on a scavenger hunt in search of new plants to identify and life cycle events to monitor, and simulated tubing down a snowy mountain in a chalk masterpiece. There was something for everyone and we enjoyed being a part of it! Thanks to the artists who brought their projects back to life and for everyone who came out to play.

Northern Spark Partner Announcement

Is your organization interested in being part of Northern Spark? We’re convening a Partners Meeting on Wednesday, September 7 at 3pm at Bedlam Theater Lowertown. Come learn about opportunities for participating as a presenting organization. This meeting is for formal or informal organizations; info sessions for individual artists are forthcoming.

If interested, please RSVP to Sarah Peters: sarah@northern.lights.mn

Staff Announcements

We’re pleased to welcome several new staff to Northern Lights.mn as we gear up for Northern Spark 2017 along the Green Line. Join us in saying hello to:


Sarah Peters, Co-Director  

Sarah has worked with Northern Spark since the beginning (in charge of curating the food trucks in 2011). In her expanded role, she will continue to focus on partners, outreach and communications as well as the conceptual direction of the festival. Sarah is also the Director of Public Engagement for Northern Lights.mn and before that was Associate Director of Education and Community Programs along with other positions at the Walker Art Center.  On summer weekends Sarah manages her public interactive art project the Floating Library.


Teeko Yang, Partnership and Outreach Coordinator

Teeko brings three years of community organizing experience to Northern Lights.mn as a Project Associate in Creative Placemaking at Asian Economic Development Association, where she led community advisory boards to organize artistic programming for the Little Mekong Night Market and other initiatives. Teeko also serves as the Art and Culture Coordinator at Impact Hub MSP and is finishing a MA in Arts and Cultural Leadership at the University of Minnesota.


Elle Thoni, Assistant Curator

Most recently Elle was the Volunteer Coordinator for Northern Spark 2016. Elle hails from the Twin Cities and recently returned from Montreal, where she was the Project Manager for The Water Shed, a live art installation by Porte Parole. At Northern Spark, she will have a wide range of responsibilities working with festival artists and maintaining the Northern Spark website. Elle is also a puppeteer and playwright working with Bedlam and In the Heart of the Beast among other local companies.

Leslie Barlow, Administrative Assistant

Leslie joined the Northern Lights.mn team in the last, hectic weeks leading up to Northern Spark 2016 and has been diving deep into projects since then. She is responsible for keeping us organized and for supporting all areas of the organization. Leslie is an active artist, who currently has a solo show up at Flow Art Space and had pieces commissioned for the new Vikings Stadium. She graduated with an MFA in Drawing and Painting from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design this spring, and she also spends her time as the Gallery Manager of Waiting Room art gallery.

We’re Hiring a Business Manager!

Northern Spark 2016. Photo: Jayme Halbritter

Help Northern Spark take care of business. We are looking for an energetic individual with good communication skills willing to sell the arts as critical to the region and help identify and implement ways for the Twin Cities community to support Northern Spark. From sponsorships to food vendors to merchandise to advertising, the Business Manager will be a key member of the Northern Spark team, helping to make this annual festival a successful and sustainable event. More information here.

 

Events We Like


Summer’s not over yet!

We’re excited to attend Little Africa Fest this Saturday, August 13, 3-8 pm at Hamline Park in St. Paul. Put on by a Northern Spark 2017 partner African Economic Development Solutions, this event features live music, dance, poetry, storytelling and of course, amazing food.

The River Balcony Prototyping Festival kicks off Saturday, September 10. Modeled on the successful Market Street Prototyping Festival in San Francisco, the Festival takes place from 10 am – 6 pm along Kellogg Blvd in downtown Saint Paul and is an exciting opportunity for local artists to prototype creative ways to bring the River Balcony to life and connect this major city corridor to the Mississippi.

 

In The News

Futures North, Phase Change, Northern Spark 2016. Photo: Max Haynes

Futures North’s project Phase Change, which premiered at Northern Spark 2016, has been named as a finalist in the SXSW Eco Place By Design Competition. Molly Reichert will be presenting the project to the jury at the conference in Austin, TX in October.

 

Northern Lights.mn Newsletter – July

Written by

 

 

Visit Us at Summer 4Play @Fort Snelling State Park

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Robin Schwartzman and Desiree Moore, Minnesotan Ice. Northern Spark 2016. Photo: Dusty Hoskovec

Northern Spark @ Summer 4Play

Saturday, July 30
at Fort Snelling State Park
11am – 4pm
More details on Facebook.

Northern Lights.mn returns to Fort Snelling State Park this July with a bevy of artist projects originally presented at this year’s Northern Spark festival. These interactive stations playfully engage you in serious subjects but who can tell, it’s a game!

Barter for an ice pop from the future, play games at the Climate Carnival, watch as a 3-D chalk drawing emerges on the sidewalk and hang out in a vintage trailer-turned-Climate Chaser recording studio.

Installations you’ll find:

Christine Bauemler, Backyard Phenology: Tracking Nature’s Cycles in a Changing Climate
Hang out in a re-habbed vintage trailer called the Climate Chaser and record your backyard or state park observations about your immediate environment. Pick up a Phenology Passport to use all year.

Shawn McCann, Live Chalk Drawing
Watch as McCann draws a 3-D world in chalk on the sidewalk over the course of the day.

Robin Schwartzman, Minnesotan Ice 
Visit a state-fair concession stand from a dystopian Minnesotan future; one where potable water is a special occasion. Follow the signs and barter for a treat that will rocket you into the ice age.

Yes Let’s, Climate Carnival 
Step up and try your hand a classic carnival games with a climate twist. Test your strength with Pedal Power, save the seals with Collateral Cleanup, guess waste metrics at the Guessing Booth, take a shot at Recycle Toss, or clean up the ocean with The Claw Cleaner.

Northern Spark @ Summer 4Play is curated and produced by Northern Lights.mn and presented by Greater MSP, Mississippi Park Connection, National Park Service, REI, and Wilderness Inquiry

IN Light IN

Amanda Browder, commissioned light project “At Night We Light Up” for the facade of the Indianapolis Power and Light building in downtown Indianapolis, IN Light IN Festival.
Northern Lights.mn is excited to be partnering with the Central Indiana Community Foundation to co-present IN Light IN, the inaugural Indianapolis Light Festival August 26 and 27. IN Light IN is a dazzling, free, two-day interactive light festival, featuring artists and performers from Indianapolis, the Twin Cities and beyond, at some of the city’s most inspiring sites.

Installations and performances by Anila Quayyum Agha, Aphidoidea, Amanda Browder, Tiffany Carbonneau and Susanna Crum, Daily Tous Les Jours, Alexis Gideon, Ryan Patrick Griffin, Owens + Crawley, Jamie Pawlus, Robin Schwartzman, Piotr Szyhalski, YesYesNo, Lauren Zoll, and many other artists will encourage exploration and participation of Indianapolis along the Downtown Canal and the adjacent Indianapolis Cultural Trail.

IN Light IN, 8:52 pm – 1:05 am, Friday August 26 and Saturday August 27, 2016

Neighborhood Climate Change

Vince Leo, Tomato Patch, 2016

“In the late 1980s, when I first started growing tomatoes in Minnesota, I planted at the end of the first week in June. Nurseries almost never even placed tomato plants on the shelves before Memorial Day. Last year I planted tomatoes on May 24 and this year May 25. Meaning that over the span of several decades, at least in my case, climate change has expanded the tomato-growing season by almost two weeks on the front end. Meaning that I now have earlier harvests and more tomatoes. Meaning that every time I bite into a home-grown tomato, the marvelous taste is inextricably bound to a deep and unshakeable dread.” – VL

The world often equates climate change with distant, dire circumstances: polar bears in the Arctic, penguins in the Antarctic, deforestation in the Amazon, the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef. While these are indeed worthy concerns, we are interested in your “neighborhood.”

What are the signs of climate change that you notice when you are riding your bike to the grocery store or walking your dog in the evening or in your garden out your back door or that place you’ve always vacationed for the last decade? What are the steps your friends are taking to limit their carbon footprint? What are some of the actions you see neighborhood organizations taking to mitigate climate change?

We have asked 365 photographers from around the world to document such occurrences; to capture climate change and the struggle to control it at the local level, as it appears as part of everyday life. Every day for the next year, we will release one of these photographs and stories on Neighborhood Climate Change and other social media channels.

Northern Spark in Pictures

Illuminated Reef Collective, The Illuminated Reef. Northern Spark 2016. Photo: Max Haynes

Photos from Northern Spark 2016 are now ready for viewing. Take a look back at your favorite projects and relive the moments from Climate Chaos | Climate Rising. And mark your calendar for next year’s festival along the Green Line on June 10, 2017.

While you’re at it, check out Make It. MSP.’s recap of Northern Spark projects.

Art(ists) on the Verge 7 Videos

Eric F. Avery, 67 simple operations, AOV7. Photo: Rik Sferra

Check out the videos of these AOV7 artists who presented projects at the Soap Factory this spring. You can see the AOV8 exhibition at the Nash Gallery in June 2017.

Call for Art Addressing Police Brutality and Racial Justice

At Northern Lights.mn we believe in the power of art in response to violence. In times when injustice is overwhelming and options seem limited, art can heal, question, bring people together, and open up possibilities for change. In this season of uncertainty and distress, it is important to create and share art addressing police brutality and racial injustice. Please consider contributing your artwork to Pollen’s call for art (due today), and let us know if you have additional opportunities we can share.

#blacklivesmatter #PhilandoCastile

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Business Manager

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Northern Lights.mn is a collaborative, interactive media-oriented, arts organization from the Twin Cities for the world. We create platforms with and for artists, audiences, and partners to experiment with and experience innovative art in the public sphere.

Northern Spark is an all­ night arts festival.  Now in its 6th year, Northern Spark will light up Minneapolis on Saturday, June 11, 2016 with the theme of Climate Chaos / Climate Rising. This theme will continue into 2017 for the largest-ever Northern Spark along the Green Line on Saturday, June 10, 2017. For more information about the festival, visit northernspark.org.

Job Description: Business Manager

The purpose of this job is to manage and increase earned revenue streams for Northern Spark. The Business Manager will work closely with the Artistic Director, Co-Director and Projects Manager in five areas: festival and project sponsors, festival program ads, food vendors, merchandise, and new revenue opportunities. Tasks include but are not limited to:

  • Creating earned revenue plan for NS17
  • Working with NS staff to create sponsorship proposals
  • Contacting businesses to solicit sponsorships of Northern Spark festival
  • Contacting businesses to solicit sponsorships of artwork
  • Contacting businesses to build awareness of the festival
  • Contacting businesses to solicit ad buys
  • Working with the Launch Party Coordinator and Host Committee to solicit sponsorship of the Launch Party
  • Soliciting and managing food vendor participation in Northern Spark
  • Work with NS staff to create merchandise plan
  • Working with the Volunteer Coordinator to solicit food donations for volunteers
  • Managing sponsor relations
  • Managing hosting of sponsors night of Northern Spark
  • Overseeing sponsor contracting and contract fulfillment
  • Attending weekly meeting with Artistic Director and other staff
  • Attending NS staff meetings monthly, or as often as desired. (Held weekly)
  • Maintaining in a timely manner all info systems requirements

Deadline to apply

Send resume and cover letter to jobs@northern.lights.mn by Friday, August 26, 2016

Desired skills and experience

  • Experience with sponsorships and other revenue generating programs
  • Experience working in a festival context
  • Experience working with arts and cultural organizations in the nonprofit sector.
  • Excellent organizational and communications skills
  • Leadership ability and project management skills
  • Good interpersonal skills; ability to work with and learn from different kinds of people
  • Ability to work with a small, busy team of colleagues and self direct when necessary
  • Ability to work a flexible schedule with occasional weekend and evening meetings
  • Experience with Google Docs, Asana, and CiviCRM are preferred but not necessary.

Details

Fee: $24/hr

Estimated hours: varies from approximately 16-20 hours week September – March to 6-10 hours week April – June

Required availability: Able to work on-site for meetings Tuesday – Thursday and remotely on Mondays and Fridays. Occasional weekend and evening meetings. Must be available week of June 5-10, 2017

Contract duration: September, 2016  – June 30, 2017

Reports to: Artistic Director

Required equipment: Must have own computer and internet access.

Eating with Strangers to Save the Earth

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With Northern Spark 2016 and 2017 as bookends, Making the Best of It: Dandelion(MtBoI:D) is a 12-month experiment in hospitality and companionship. Through a series of pop-up community meals hosted throughout different neighborhoods across Minnesota, collaborators Marina Zurkow, Valentine Cadieux, Aaron Marx, and Sarah Petersen will sustain conversations about “the risks of climate chaos, our business-as-usual food system, and the short-term food innovations at our disposal.”

MtBoI:D envisions the future through upbeat attitudes inflected with hints of survivalism. As with Zurkow’s tandem iteration of the project, which focuses on jellyfish, the sourcing of meals from both dwindling or abundant anthropocene “wildlife” addresses human-led catastrophes while actually brainstorming opportunities for growth and adaptation.

As climate activist and Northern Spark Advisory Committee member Wen Stephenson points out, “despite the remarkable gains of renewable energy worldwide, and the promise of new technologies, we are nevertheless racing toward worst-case scenarios.” We can either remain paralyzed with indecision or actively make the best of it. Under shadows of bulk data that describe trees suffocating, oil spilling, and refugees fleeing war or climate disasters, MtBoI:D embeds these facts within sustained empathic experiences.

For Cadieux, the 12-month scope of MtBoI:D “allows people to sit with their discomfort” by offering enough time to share and understand one another’s concerns. Because responses to climate change can no longer remain entangled with our own small consumer choices, our next steps must be communal. Upgrading lightbulbs, flushing less, recycling more, even retweeting propaganda, these are helpful but minor. Organizing boycotts, sit-ins, and strikes, coordinating purchasing power en mass and good old fashioned lobbying, these impact progress. And to get there, we can start by sharing meals with strangers and continuing the kinds of difficult conversations that don’t conclude.

At the center of the project’s communal table sits the dandelion, a nutritious and abundant wildflower that can be steeped for tea, fermented for wine, sautéed, eaten raw, pickled, or battered and fried—some research even shows that three cups of dandelion tea can curb the spread of cancer. Not only have dandelions long since proven an endurance in disturbed or anthropogenic habitats like mowed lawns and cracked concrete, in 2007 NPR reported that scientists had publishednew findings in the journal Weed Science, discovering that the wildflower actually thrives with increased levels of carbon dioxide. In a future world of 400+ ppm CO2, they would proliferate and grow physically, meaning more and bigger dandelions. While the researching scientists and even the reporting skewed negative by relegating these projected super dandelions to the status of nuisance, MtBoI:D generates a sense of flavorful possibility.

By encouraging folks to appreciate food found outside plastic packaging and corner stores, MtBoI:D taps into a decades-long tradition of urban foraging in America. In the 1980s ecologist “Wildman” Steve Brill was arrested in Central Park for, as the Parks Commissioner at the time said, “eating our parks.” Two undercover rangers nabbed Brill for leading foraging tours without a permit and charged him for criminal mischief. Brill and his tour mates were eating dandelions.

MtBoI:D builds from recipes and tips shared by foragers like Brill, who still leads tours in New York, and foodie leaders like Kim Bartmann to consider each meal throughout the yearlong project not as a retreat but as a refuge. These recurring meals will offer space where people return and affirm their worries, hopes, and strategies. Cadieux approaches these experiences as opportunities “to practice new relational habits” to be shaped, playtested, and enacted.

Imagine an earth with 400+ ppm CO2, dandelions as big as cats, common grains no longer common, and sugar beets and berries a rarity. For one of MtBoI:D’s meals, everyone could be asked to bring a flour-based dish baked with flour-substitutes. Or desserts made without honey or sugar. Each person could be served different communal dishes and then barter or ration portions and preferences across the table.

This dynamic of forecasting a future world will surely invigorate the often sluggish process of building relationships. Here the dining table becomes the place where folks can realize our shared responsibility for climate mitigation and adaptation. And rather than searching for one-off solutions, systems-based thinking is the touchstone of MtBoI:D. As author and environmentalist Naomi Klein asks in theeponymous documentary based on her book, This Changes Everything, “What if global warming isn’t only a crisis? What if it’s the best chance we’re ever going to get to build a better world?” When we think of this as the question (How do we build a better world?) we can see the deep faults of solution-based thinking. For Zurkow, the error is baked into the approach, that “the idea of a solution is ‘there, I fixed it, now I get to sleep.’” But systems-based thinking is iterative and starts with knowing that there is no end, no one solution to any one challenge. Every thing and every one of us is woven together. The systemic responsiveness modeled by MtBoI:D will be sustained through active companionship.

 

— Nathan RP Young

Northern Spark Partnership and Outreach Coordinator

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Northern Lights.mn seeks a Partnership and Outreach Coordinator to support the partnership work of the Northern Spark festival.

Northern Lights.mn is a collaborative, interactive media-oriented, arts organization from the Twin Cities for the world. We create platforms with and for artists, audiences, and partners to experiment with and experience innovative art in the public sphere.

Northern Spark is an all­ night arts festival.  Now in its 6th year, Northern Spark will light up Minneapolis on Saturday, June 11, 2016 with the theme of Climate Chaos / Climate Rising. This theme will continue into 2017 for the largest-ever Northern Spark along the Green Line on Saturday, June 10, 2017. For more information about the festival, visit northernspark.org.

Job Description: Northern Spark Partnership and Outreach Coordinator

Northern Lights.mn works with up to 75 art, culture and neighborhood organizations to produce programming for Northern Spark. Several community engagement initiatives are ongoing in advance of the 2017 festival, which expands all-night activities to include multiple zones in Minneapolis and St. Paul with the Green Line train as a connector. In partnership with organizations in three districts aong the Green Line: West Bank neighborhood in Minneapolis and Little Mekong and Little Africa in St. Paul, Northern Lights.mn is convening community-led Programming Councils to shape artist and public participation in Northern Spark. The Partnership and Outreach Coordinator will work with the festival’s Associate Director in managing these relationships as well as fostering new partnerships.

A successful candidate will have experience working with a range of organizations from small arts non-profits to large institutions to community groups. A core function of this position is to attend events and meetings to build relationships with potential and existing partners, community groups and neighborhood organizations. Experience working with or knowledge of arts-based economic development is helpful, particularly along the Green Line corridor.

This position is also responsible for administrative tasks, such as scheduling and coordinating partner meetings, attending follow-up meetings, tracking projects and working with fellow staff to ensure completion of contracts and invoices.

Deadline to apply

Send resume and cover letter to jobs@northern.lights.mn by Friday, May 27, 2016.

Fee

$20/hr

Estimated hours

20 hours a week

Required availability

Able to work on-site part-time Tuesday – Thursday and remotely on Mondays and Fridays. Occasional weekend and evening meetings.

Contract duration

June 10, 2016  – June 30, 2017

Reports to

NS Associate Director

Required skills and experience

  • 2-3 years experience working with arts and cultural organizations in the non-profit sector.
  • Knowledge of arts-based economic initiatives and organizing strategies
  • Excellent organizational and communications skills, including public speaking and leading meetings
  • Leadership ability and project management skills
  • Good interpersonal skills; ability to work with and learn from different kinds of people
  • Ability to work with a small, busy team of colleagues and self direct when necessary
  • Ability to work a flexible schedule with occasional weekend and evening meetings
  • Experience with Google Docs, Asana, and CiviCRM are preferred but not necessary.

Required equipment

Must have own computer and internet access.

A Murmuration of People in the Streets

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Walk outside during lunchtime on any given day in downtown Minneapolis and you could count out about 100 people crossing the street, waving cars to keep going, or sidestepping each other on a clogged sidewalk, all doing the familiar pedestrian dance. Now imagine about 100 performers arranged alongside West River Parkway all moving together as individuals, “like a murmuration of birds,” Aniccha Arts collaborator Piotr Szyhalski explains, “we’re not behind each other but next to each other; not the queue, but an abacus.”

For this year’s Northern Spark festival the performance collaborative Aniccha Arts will present Census, a 100-person event beginning with dusk on July 11, 2016 and continuing nonstop until the sun rises. At the heart of this production is a deep investment in a collaborative and integrated sense of process, where the artists have drawn from various personal histories and disciplines to arrive at a common language of physical embodiment.

 

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Rehearsal for Census at YWCA of Minneapolis Midtown

 

Census features members of historically underrepresented communities particularly in terms of race, ethnicity, dis/ability, and gender-nonconformity because, as Aniccha Arts’ artistic director Pramila Vasudevan says, “bringing together these communities in space is a non-normative occurrence in the contemporary art scene.”

Census facilitates a return to public space and the self-expression of individual bodies. Referencing the strategic unruliness of recent marches and protests, Szyhalski sees the event as “reclaiming the public street as somewhere that is democratically possible. We are using the subtle language of art rather than overt politics.” And rather than being prescriptive, Census is a responsive work of art. The critical mass of over 100 moving bodies allows for audiences to see a demonstration opposing the institutional pressures that alienate communities.

A lead team of 13 collaborators began sketching Census by asking two questions, “how do we work across and within communities simultaneously, and how do we organize  people towards a critical mass?” For Aniccha Arts, this tipping point is ambiguous, and not for them to define or even predict. The purpose of Census brings people together and generates productive friction as a means to achieve the potential of a critical mass. Especially when placed among the themes of Northern Spark 2016, Aniccha Arts converts the audience into community. Those who experience Census will inevitably disperse and return to their homes, and they may carry it as a model to continue building this potential energy towards a critical mass of interconnected action.  

The spirit of this project goes beyond the task of diversifying representation. Intersectionality is a core value of this project, allowing a more nuanced understanding of systematic injustice and social inequality within our communities. Experiencing the sheer scale of Census enhances the realization of the power of collective movement and coordinated action.  

The pun of performing/creating Census points to the implications of demographic enumerations as the US government’s decennial process tends to produce artificial images of a given populace. “People don’t like to be counted and boxed,” Vasudevan reminds us. Census could more accurately, “looks like a document that shows the ways the world patterns itself within each body.” Census the performance becomes a differently helpful census of people, a mutually constructed living document of our own community designed to be an organic recording of each others’ bodies. In relation to Northern Spark 2016 themes Move and Perceive, witnessing the event becomes a form of live data analysis.  

The murmuration of starlings returns here as fruitful metaphor to understand the emergent process of Census. A flock of starlings is known as a murmuration, and together, preparing to roost, they align themselves in the sky like a flag whipping in the wind. Without a leader or an immediate destination the starlings respond nearly instantaneously to one another within their physical network. The mutual influence of each bird affecting its neighbor in flight harkens to a mathematical model called scale-free correlation, often used to track the “’criticality’ of crystal formation and avalanches — systems poised on the brink, capable of near-instantaneous transformation.”  Moments of improvisational solutions carry Aniccha Arts through their creative process as team members brainstorm and test ideas together and apart. As with many ideas brewed by the collaborative, the connection with murmuration appeared coincidentally during early rehearsals of Census.

Through this project Vasudevan encourages a “co-dependent creative process.” To produce and polish the sketches of Census, Vasudevan and the team of 13 have designed several perspectives, as they call them, from which to develop the final version of the performance: movement, light, object, technology, and text. Two different members of the team lead each perspective, allowing the project to develop separately and in unison. They routinely return together to share new and scuttled ideas. Like a murmuration of birds, the decision of one perspective affects all others.

These first members building through the five perspectives quickly absorbed 25 new performers, and before the night of Northern Spark they will all welcome 75 more. As a way to heighten the conversion of audience to community, the team of 13 has designed simple movements to share with festival-goers who wish to join the performance. “The more successful this project becomes,” Vasudevan says, “the less involved I become.”

Census is a workshop. The immediate destination cannot be seen, the collaborative always expands, and the upshot of the desired critical mass is unclear —the criticality has yet to crack. Aniccha Arts happily dwells in this movement of becoming

—Nathan RP Young

 

Beyond Green: The Arts as a Catalyst for Sustainability

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Schloss Leopoldskron, Salzburg, Austria Schloss Leopoldskron, Salzburg, Austria

With Northern Lights.mn’s decision to devote the next two years of Northern Spark and related year-round programming to the effects of climate change under the rubric Climate Chaos | Climate Rising, team, we have been thinking a lot about the possible relations of art and artists to the future of humanity.

I was thrilled, therefore, to get the opportunity recently, with the support of the Bush Foundation, to attend a Salzburg Global Seminar (the 561st since 1947), Beyond Green: The Arts as a Catalyst for Sustainability. With a worldwide roster of incredibly accomplished attendees, it promised to be fertile grounds for research and thoughtful discussion.

Reading List

The Spirit of Sovereignty Woven into the Fabric of Tribal Communities: Culture Bearers As Agents of Change By Lori Pourier (Oglala Lakota)

Seminar attendees were asked to provide links to resources about the arts and sustainability, and these ranged from “A Good Life in a Sustainable Nordic Region. Nordic Strategy for Sustainable Development.Nordic Council of Ministers” to “Local Plant Knowledge for Livelihoods: An Ethnobotanical Survey in the Garhwal Himalaya, Uttarakhand, India” to “The Spirit of Sovereignty Woven into the Fabric of Tribal Communities: Culture Bearers As Agents of Change.” In other words from policy documents to research findings to documentation of artists’ projects.

One unsurprising thing that comes through in much of the reading is the amazing lack of broadly articulated cultural policy in the United States compared to almost anywhere else in the world. What would it be like to live in a country where arts and culture are enshrined as pillars of development, such as in countries that take the U.N’s Agenda 21 as a legitimate document? What would it be like to not have to justify art as something more than an economic driver – as important and valuable as that is? I am not so naive as to believe that everything is hunky dory elsewhere, but the starting points of the value(s) of arts and culture are so different in some countries, and that’s a difference that makes a difference. That’s a difference that could be a matter of societal resilience in the face of the inevitable effects of climate change.

One of the most fascinating readings, which really attempted to tackle some of the underlying and debatable philosophical principles at stake, was Adrienne Goehler’s “Conceptual Thoughts on Establishing a Fund for Aesthetics and Sustainability.” Her broad set of drivers for the necessity such funding included “ten imperatives”: democratize, think and act, liberate, spawn, become fluid, listen and observe and publicize, charge, perceive, combine and link, admit.

One thing that Goehler emphasized, which is near and dear to team Northern Lights is that

“Sustainability is not understood by individuals as a space of possibility because it is not yet linked to the sensuality and passion of personal action, but is still mainly seen as an appeal to the superego or the well-filled wallet.”

and of course, we are in solidarity with:

“Sustainability is the result of thinking new things and seeing the familiar from a new perspective.”

She even takes on the relevance of the policies I was lusting for earlier:

“The sustainability debate and their advocates, the Agenda 21 initiatives are clearly stuck in a dead end because in spite of their comprehensive, indeed holistic, approach, they are still perceived as being restricted largely to the field of ecology, and they themselves do not understand sustainability as a genuinely cultural challenge. …  [According to the Tutzinger Manifesto] in order to make sustainability a life force, ‘it is critical to integrate participants with the ability to bring ideas, visions, and existential experiences alive in socially recognizable symbols, rituals, and practices.’”

As we like to say at team Northern Lights: ““People need facts to make informed decisions, but it’s stories and culture that change people’s minds—and behavior. Artists create connection points to issues that may seem tired or impossibly contentious. We follow them in through beauty, wonder, and curiosity and quickly find ourselves engaged in a complex issue seen differently.”

What follows is not intended to be complete in any way. A formal report of the Seminar will be published in the near future, and these represent an inadequate sampling of some highlights.

Artists Inspiring Change

Opening Conversation: Artists Inspiring Change: Alexis Frasz, Kalyanee Mam, Frances Whitehead

For the opening conversation of the Seminar, Kalyanee Mam, spoke about her film A River Changes Course, which was the winner of the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary at Sundance, and “tells the story of three families living in contemporary Cambodia as they face hard choices forced by rapid development and struggle to maintain their traditional ways of life as the modern world closes in around them.” And Frances Whitehead gave a version of her Plenary talk for Cultures In Sustainable Futures in Helsinki, which covered such work as The Embedded Artist Project, Slow Clean-Up, and a long term project The 606.

The work and presentations seemed so different – personal, documentary, pov and systematic, theoretic, interventionist – that at first blush it was hard to imagine where the conversation could crossover. One comment, however, put into perspective a lesson that would be repeated over and over during the week. Kaly’s work was, in essence, about pre-development or “during-development,” and Frances’s about a post-development situation. Two sides of the same coin. The forests and fisheries of Cambodia had not yet been completely devastated, but the trajectory was clear, and in Chicago and Gary, nature had to be reintroduced into the industrialized, designed, built-on landscape. How can what has happened in the North be in dialog with the majority world, which is all too often the downstream recipient of our actions? What do we both need to learn?

Raising Awareness: International Mother Tongue Day 

Shahidul Alam, Raising Awareness and Catalyzing Public Engagement. Photo: Salzburg Global Seminar

Shahidul Alam spoke of his photography in the service of political consequences and made the appropriately pointed point about not feeling any less “developed” or almost any other term that is applied to Bangladesh all the time. He lives in the “majority world,” and it is important that this is recognized. As he put it at one point: “Until lions find their storyteller, stories about hunting will always glorify the hunter.” And the storyteller – as we learned more about later – often works through analogy. Shahidul spoke about the careful planning that went into an apparently innocent photography exhibit that included a photograph of a rice paddy. Beautiful and “benign” seeming, the title of the exhibition, “Crossfire” provided a completely different context for the people of Bangladesh, who were experiencing a horror of extra-judicial killings at the time.

 

In the afternoon, Pireeni Sundaralingam, a poet and neuroscientist, spoke mostly from the neuroscience side of her brain brain about if we’re truly trying to change people’s behavior, what do we know about behavior and how to change it from an experimental perspective?

Things That Don’t Work

  • Repeat messaging
  • Appeals to logic
  • Arguments based on the lack of time in the future
  • High intensity emotional messaging

Let me repeat that…

Needless to say, everyone of us has likely used each of these techniques to reinforce our messaging about the urgency of climate change. Pireeni went through a series of hilarious and sobering experiments, mostly in the last decade, which essentially proved the ineffectiveness of each of these strategies.

So what does work? I was unable to capture all of the points Pireeni made, but one critical one is simple: the brain is an analogy device. The brain, from a behavioral point of view, is nothing like a logic machine. It responds to analogies and metaphor, like the language found in poetry or photography or art. If we want to change people’s behavior, ultimately it will be through stories and analogies and metaphor: art. Not repeated warnings about the coming disaster and what a logical response would be.

Enlightening.

The City As a Driver of Change

On Day 3, we shifted from a focus on individual projects to more systemic responses, particularly in relation to the city as the site of more than 50% of the world’s population.

There were great presentations all day long from artists, policymakers, and activists around the world, but I want to call out some notes of the talk by  Marco Kusumawijaya, Director, Rujak Centre for Urban Studies, Jakarta, Indonesia. Like many of the speakers, he reinforced the dictum that sustainability is a cultural problem, but he also suggested that the city – thinking of it as a cultural platform, almost – could and should be concerned with more than development. He referred to the “brutality of development.” The city should be a driver for solidarity and equity as well as a critique of nationalism and globalization. Development in this context should be building more commons. The centerpiece of community is the commons. Simple, really, but felt like an amazing lever to wrest the conversation away from all the arts and economic development palaver, especially in the United States.

Encouraging Bolder Policymaking

Not only does much of the rest of the world have cultural policymaking, but they are self-reflective about how to make it bolder!

Camilla Bausch, who is a long-standing member of the German delegation to the United Nations climate negotiations made particularly heartening comments about the how of bolder policymaking, suggesting that after the failure of Copenhagen, state actors realized they cannot do it alone regarding what needs to be done about climate change. Even at the policy level, non-state actors are critical. For example, the COP21 designated negotiators for COP21 in Paris never would have moved to 1.5 degree temperature rise as the maximum goal, if it wasn’t for the external pressure – then and the months and years leading up to Paris – of non-state actors. Projects like Climate Chaos | Climate Rising are important not only in terms of individual behavior and systems intervention but also as both goad and support for bolder policymaking.

We Are What We Eat

The last program I want to mention was a “fireside chat” moderated, passionately, by  Pavlos Georgiadis, an Ethnobotanist, AgriFood Author & Climate Tracker.  

Prairie Rose Seminole,  a Prevention Specialist for The Boys and Girls Club of the Three Affiliated

Tribes, New Town, ND, gave a sobering presentation about the food deserts so common on Indian reservations and the endemic health problems that this gives rise to. At the same time, there is a bountiful history of traditional foods and healing that Prairie Rose is dedicated to reinvigorating, serving us all a tea o fBear root (osha root), bergamot and grey sage.

Kamal Mouzawak is the founder of Souk el Tayeb, Beirut. Nominally the first farmers market in Lebanon, in reality it is a way for a fractured community to come together to prepare meals and eat together. Tayeb holds several meanings in Arabic: “good”, “tasty” and “goodhearted” when talking about a person. Over time, Souk el Tayeb participants’ shared humanity becomes more important than their different ethnicities and religions and good and tasty food becomes an appreciation for goodhearted people.

Rounding out the panel, journalist, activist, and film director David Gross spoke about his project Wastecooking. Inspired by the sad fact that the food thrown away in Europe alone would be enough to feed all of the world’s hungry twice over, David “has whipped up a five-part web series and regularly organizes cook-ins and performances in public spaces that serve up a critical stance on consumerism.” Sadly, we did not get to try his Apple Compote a la Dumpster Diver, but you can find the recipe here, if you are interested.

Participants

Thanks to everyone for their generous participation and sharing of knowledge and experience: Shahidul Alam, Natasha Athanasiadou, Camilla C. Bausch, Fatima Zahra Bousso-Kane, Catherine Cullen, Teresa Dillon, Cecily Engelhart, Carolina Ferres, Torben Florkemeier, Alexis Frasz, Pavlos Georgiadis, Christine Gitau, Rebecca Kneale Gould, David M. Gross, Marcus Hagermann, Etelle Higonnet, Singh Intrachooto, Seitu Jones, Vrouyr Joubanian, Sofie Regitze Kattrup, Oleg Koefoed, Marco Kusumawijaya, Thomas Layer-Wagner, Brandie N. Macdonald, Kalyanee Mam, Anee-Marie Meister, Zayd Minty, Kamal Mouzawak, Thiago Ackel (Mundano), Omar Nagati, Chukwudum Odenigbo, Yasmine Ostendorf, Kajsa Li Paludan, Rachel Plattus, Robert Praxmarer, Michael Premo, Ferdinand Richard, Anais Roesch, Ania Rok, Alain Ruche, Rachel Schragis, Anupama Sekhar, Prairie Rose Seminole, Margaret Shiu, Holly Sidford, Regina R. Smith, Francis A. Sollano, Pireeni Sundaralingam, Elizabeth Thompson, Alison Tickell, Christian Biaus, Ben Twist, Anamaria Vrabie, Frances Whitehead, Rise Wilson.

Support

Thanks to the Bush Foundation, which supported my attendance at Beyond Green, to the Salzburg Global Seminar for organizing the event, and to Edward T. Cone Foundation, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Bush Foundation, and Red Bull Amaphiko for their support of the event.