(Photo courtesy of Northern Spark)
Provided by Northern Spark (Cover photo by Ian Plant)
Northern Spark is a free, annual, dusk-to-dawn, multidisciplinary arts festival that takes place on the second Saturday of June in the Twin Cities and draws tens of thousands of Minnesotans each year. For the 2016 and 2017 festivals, the theme Climate Chaos; Climate Rising will explore the interconnected, evolving, long-term consequences from climate change, giving local and national artists a platform to help turn a sense of overwhelmment into concrete actions anchored in a realistic and hopeful map for the future.
From industrialized C02 production to extreme weather events, sea levels rising to water tables dropping, massive migrations and a sixth extinction, climate change seems to imbue every aspect of daily life with the threat of chaos.
The organizers of Northern Spark believe, however, that climate change is so much more than the science and even so much more than the critical actions that must be taken to mitigate the worst-case scenarios of rising temperatures. Climate change fundamentally challenges us to think about and act upon what it means to be human.
Over the next two years Northern Spark takes on this challenge through the lenses of migration, nourishment, interconnectedness, perception and civic action. Their programming begins in winter of 2016 by delving into issues such as the future of food, new relationships to non-human species, and radical river ecologies, and culminates in the summer of 2017 in the biggest Northern Spark yet, with innovative, interactive art projects filling the landscape along the Green Line—from Minneapolis through the neighborhoods of St. Paul to its terminus in Lowertown.
Saturday, June 11, 9 pm to 5:26 am
Northern Spark will ignite its theme with an immersive, thought-provoking art festival, workshops, and lectures on urgent questions around the future of Earth’s environment.
At dusk the festival will open at the Minneapolis Convention Center with the unveiling of the newest winner of the Creative City Challenge. The festival will continue all night long in Minneapolis’s Mill District as audiences explore climate topics—Move, Nourish, Interconnect, Perceive, Act—through giant video projections, performances and installations in the streets, and in green spaces and under bridges along the waterfront. Food trucks will offer snacks and drinks throughout the night and audiences can relax in a specially commissioned “chill” conversation space constructed out of ice harvested from Minnesota lakes during the winter.
In addition to the festival’s participatory artist projects, they’re adding a night-time track of inspiring talks by climate scientists, policy wonks, visionary engineers, political activists, and artists, as well as activities and workshops for audiences to further participate in.
For more information see 2016.northernspark.org.
Northern Spark is presented by Northern Lights MN, a nonprofit arts organization with the mission to transform our sense of what’s possible in public space. Northern Lights.mn shines throughout the year with projects such as the Giant Sing-a-long at the Minnesota State Fair, Art(ists) On the Verge, and permanent, interactive public art for Saint Paul Union Depot.
See related: All Environment News on MinnyApple.com
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