Estonian students win second prize at Snow Fest with cyborg chimpanzee sculpture
A team of students from the sculpture department at Tartu's Pallas University of Applied Sciences (Kõrgem Kunstikool Pallas) secured second place at Nallikari Snow Fest 2025, an international snow sculpture competition in Oulu, Finland. The team spent three days carving a cyborg chimpanzee out of the Finnish snow.
The Cyber Monkeys team, which comprised of Pallas sculpture students Andres Rattasepp, Stefani Freitok and Enriko Saar, reached the final round of the competition with their design "To be a chimpanzee or to be a cyborg chimpanzee, that is the question." A total of 19 teams from more than ten countries applied to take part in the festival, with only eight making the final cut.
"Of course, it's a great feeling to be one of the eight participants in a pretty competitive field. It also means that we have four exciting, but also very stressful days ahead of us in Nallikari, where we have to shovel through a huge amount of snow in 40 hours to create a giant chimpanzee's head out of a 3 meter block," said team captain Andres Rattasepp ahead of the competition.
The efforts of the Pallas students paid off, with their sculpture awarded second prize, which also secures them an invitation to the 2026 festival, when Oulu will be the European Capital of Culture.
Every year, the Nallikari Snow Fest brings together a host of world-class snow sculptors, giving audiences a unique opportunity to watch monumental snow sculptures being created right before their eyes.
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Editor: Michael Cole
