#aquilcharlton

[maryaspontlemus]

The Mobilize Creative Collaborative is a collective of four artists—Aquil Charlton, William Estrada, Andrés Lemus-Spont, and me—who (usually) utilize bicycle-based makerspaces to provide free arts workshops for youth and adults in public places. We work to thoughtfully engage individuals and communities through interdisciplinary creative collaboration, critical conversations about what participants care about, and mobile mobilizing.

This past summer, the MCC was scheduled to facilitate a number of in-person workshops in public spaces through the Chicago Park District’s Night Out in the Parks initiative. As you might guess, those didn’t happen, but we were excited to be invited to create a short video workshop as part of the revised Your Night Out At Home* programming instead.

So the guys and I came up with “Let’s Make Do!”

In this video, the Mobilize Creative Collaborative's members facilitate a playful interdisciplinary arts workshop from their homes. The MCC invites you and your loved ones to participate in these creative making and thinking activities with whatever things you have around you, drawing upon your own experiences.

Adapting our longstanding approach (of very open-ended, participant-responsive or participant-led, reused-material-heavy, drop-in and happened-upon, etc., etc.), public collaborations to an edited, unidirectional, 20-minute workshop was definitely challenging. And some of my favorite parts of our original recording—especially a several-minute jam session led by Aquil—ultimately had to be cut because of the ways in which Zoom captured the multi-source sound. But I do think the final video reflects important aspects of the spirit of our engagements, and offers something not so possible in person. We made the video in September and it went live in October, months when we would typically be winding down our annual programming. Even now, with subfreezing temperatures and snow on the ground outside, this workshop can be done at one’s leisure, in one’s own time and space, hopefully indoors.

*Tons of amazing artists from around the city were also invited to do this! Check out more 2020 Your Night Out at Home performances and workshops here.

Image description: A video title card. The image is an illustration with many shades of green, depicting a tree-lined cityscape and a starry night sky, with an owl (the Night Out mascot) in the bottom left-hand corner, waving to the viewer; the owl stands on a black, slightly rolling hill. In the center of the image, it reads in white text: “YOUR NIGHT OUT" with “AT HOME” tacked on; “Let’s Make Do!” and “MOBILIZE CREATIVE COLLABORATIVE”; and the hashtags #NightOutInTheParks and #MyChiParks. Along the bottom are logos for Night Out in the Parks, Music in the Key of Chicago, CHI | DCASE, and ComEd.

[edit: I initially wrote "subzero" instead of "subfreezing"; was on C instead of F, lol]