Glowing Giants. Courtesy Chicks-on-Sticks.

mini_polis

This year’s Creative City Challenge winner is a scale model of Minneapolis built in collaboration with community participants in a series of “build workshops.” The mini_polis team will collect place-based hopes and memories at the workshops and then create a multimedia interface within the finished city model to share these stories. The completed mini_polis will be a physical platform for activities, from city classroom to stage set. Let us know if you would like to use it for your own community event! Find out more on the mini_polis blog.

From 8:30 – 10:30pm, mini_polis will be inhabited by Chicks on Sticks—mobile, glowing beacons dancing around the Cloud Cult concert.

Founded in 1998 by Amy Ballestad and Shelley Chinander, Chicks on Sticks (CoS) perform the ancient and universal art of stiltwalking while also exploring the powerful dynamic of working together as an all-female collective. CoS is dedicated to fostering the growth of pageantry, celebration, and ritual theatre through creating dynamic performances in a supportive, collaborative atmosphere.

About Creative City Challenge

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 at the Minneapolis Convention Center Plaza an artwork, which is an innovative use of the space and acts as a sociable and participatory platform for scheduled and impromptu onsite programs throughout the summer.

The mini_polis Team

SocialSculpture is a collaboration of artists bent on bringing creative agency to everyone. We see making as fulfilling a basic human need, and making in the public sphere as an inherently positive act that we want everyone to have access to. We are excited about the new emphasis on public participation in the Creative City Challenge, and would like to offer our unique blend of teaching, making, and collaborating skills for consideration.

In our social art practice, we identify familiar objects and social habits – small social occasions, nostalgic children’s games, familiar rituals of hospitality. We deploy them in a way that channels the urban energy of the Twin Cities, and allows people moving down their well-trodden paths of habit to shift just enough to come into contact with one another, or have an experience that nudges them out of the ordinary.

Partners

Leonardo’s Basement, Cedar Riverside Community School, Juxtaposition Arts, Native American Community Development Institute, and Sierra Club.