Huge Sillytoe is a large and daft toe. They are also a transdisciplinary artist whose work has been labelled by different people in different moments as performance, live art, experimental theatre, community theatre, relational art, artivism, eco-art, sound art, textile art, music, poetry, installation, sculpture, art-as-research… The list grows on – like feelings, bacteria, the winding of rope, lightning bolts across the sky, developing bones – all reaching towards places unknown. Huge proposes these diverse artworks as a constellation of explorations of their aesthetic-political philosophy of Spoonbroccolism (also known as pragmatic-absurdo-anarchism), as explored in their manifes-toe below.
Harnessing their unique artistic position as a shape-shifting oversized and foolish toe, Huge Sillytoe seeks to create artworks that challenge normative perceptions of ‘sense’ and undermine associated power/knowledge hierarchies. Their tools for doing this include expanding foam, skateboards, green juice, cosmic energy, protein porridge, sewing machines, popcorn, bagpipes, root vegetables, screwdrivers, pantyhose, cardboard, watermelons, warm hugs, and thunderstorms as well as masks, puppets, musical instruments, and interactive sculptures and installations often built from found and reclaimed materials. In this way Huge’s artworks toe open the pathway to a queerer and more just world, assisting others to trample this trail further via facilitating workshops and participatory community arts experiments where new practices of transgressive, emancipatory creation and performance are nurtured collectively by different groups across diverse locations.
Hailing from Durham, North East England, Huge Sillytoe is now itinerant, based during recent years between Johannesburg, Medellín, Mexico City, New York City, Buenos Aires, and London, with regular research, residency, and performance trips elsewhere. Their artistic, activist, and academic work is intertwined and mutually informing. They hold a BA in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge, MA in Interdisciplinary Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences from the University of Chicago, and practice-led PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Glasgow. They have presented work across both notorious underground venues and prestigious art institutions worldwide including at Centre for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow), Manuke (Tokyo), MKA: Theatre of New Writing (Melbourne), Grace Exhibition Space (New York), Judson Memorial Church (New York), Experiencia Hiedra (Buenos Aires), Temporary Autonomous Arts (London), Casa Viva (Mexico City), Latvian Academy of Arts (Riga), Myymälä2 (Helsinki), CineNaveMetro (San Salvador), Fondazione Pistoletto Cittadellarte (Biella), Imagineros Sala (Medellín), Museum of Contemporary Art of Panama (Panama City), Hiperactiva Lab (La Paz), POPArt Performing Arts Centre (Johannesburg), Bushfire Festival (Mbabane), Projecto Utopia (Maputo), HOF Gallery (Nairobi), and many unexpected crevices in-between. Huge Sillytoe speaks fluent English, Spanish, Portuguese, and the supersensible language of their own creation, Toetapoelib. They make work in all these languages and more.
Spoonbroccolist Manifes-toe
The essence of spoonbroccolism (also known as oobiboobiboobism, compassionate strangeness, or pragmatic-absurdo-anarchism) is that there is no identifiable fundamental meaning for being and that within this shared existential condition of ultimate default nothingness all beings are equal and thus all hierarchies of power/knowledge are intrinsically invalid.
The queen means nothing. The president means nothing. The lord, the master, and the boss mean nothing.
You do not mean anything.
I do not mean anything.
We do not mean anything.
Or rather, all of the above may (not)mean an awful lot, but only inasmuch as we interactionally co-construct and reinforce such (non)meanings with other ultimately meaningless beings.
This is not to undermine the validity of the emotions that swirl around our co-made (non)meanings.
The butterflies in your stomach, the lump in your throat, and the glow of your heart are for feeling, not negating.
Nor is this to deny that the (non)meanings that we make, or that may be manufactured by those with greater power and privilege and thrust upon the more vulnerable and marginalized, have deep socio-political consequences.
The wounds of oppression will not heal through denial.
The spoonbroccolist seeks precisely to acknowledge the bitter reality of inequality and subjugation at the same time as acknowledging the utter foundationlessness of such tyranny and exposing this through transgressive action and production.
In an additional step the spoonbroccolist might note how this very realization of the groundlessness of power and taking responsive counter-hegemonic action is potentially a simpler and less endangering step for those already less oppressed by such baseless-yet-omnipresent networks of power/knowledge. The author of this manifesto for example – a white, European human assigned male at birth who claims to also be a daft, shape-shifting, oversized toe – notes that their ability to make such a claim and carry out associated counter-normative interventions is facilitated by their own advantaged intersectional position in relation to the very artifice of privilege that they wish for their actions to contribute to destroying.
Without a leg to stand on, fascist boots still crash down, and much heavier upon some than others.
This realization of the sheer injustice of one absurd being claiming to be superior to another absurd being and using this baseless claim to legitimate abuse, enslavement, and murder has its own emotional ramifications for the spoonbroccolist: disgust and rage towards hierarchies; compassion and empathy for the downtrodden; bewilderment and bemusement at widespread acceptance and support of oppressive norms and power/knowledge structures even by many of those dominated by them.
Exasperation at the awful and stubborn preposterousness of Power – this may be seen as one of the primary drives of spoonbroccolist action.
Dominant notions of ‘sense’ undergird who is broadly considered to legitimately lay claim to power and who is not. Good sense wears an expensive suit. Good sense eats their meat with the correct knife and fork. Good sense pins a medal to the cushion with which it suffocates the poor.
Thus the spoonbroccolist crows out in both clownish falsetto and buffoonish baritone that to attack unjust matrices of power we must also attack the constructions of ‘sense’ within which they are rooted.
Here for an artist or activist to operate solely within apparently rational dominant frameworks of ‘sense’ is to risk reinforcing the very hegemonic power structures that they ostensibly oppose. Rather, the spoonbroccolist artist/activist flamboyantly snaps and undermines norms of expected comportment.
To be called irrational, mad, childish, or idiotic by those whose judgements are dictated by ascription to dominant constructions of ‘sense’ is a compliment and a victory for the spoonbroccolist. This is another small chip being kicked free from the border walls of a supremacist order that attempts to legitimize itself via constructions of ‘common sense’.
Given that spoonbroccolism may also be called pragmatic-absurdo-anarchism, some questions linger regarding these philosophical foundations of absurdism, anarchism, and pragmatism. For example, what is the absurd?
The word’ ‘absurd’ stems from the Latin ‘absurdum’ to mean ‘out of tune’. Absurdity, in its etymological core, is disharmony. It is the cacophony raging between what one may perceive ‘should be’ and what one may perceive ‘to be’.
Here, twitching their ears a little, the spoonbroccolist detects two primary strands of dissonance woven jarringly together.
One strand might be called existential absurdity. Here no matter how strongly we may desire it, there is no identifiable fundamental reason for being.
The second strand might be called socio-political absurdity. Here all beings are fundamentally equal within their shared inability to define any ultimate meaning for existence, yet baseless power/knowledge inequalities and associated oppressions persist regardless.
Existential absurdity is constant for all beings everywhere always, like an endless disharmonic drone.
Socio-political absurdity, whilst also inescapable, fluctuates in its expression for different populations between different places and times, like an endlessly oscillating disharmonic flurry of unjust notes.
The bagpipes, played horrendously, thus gift us a metaphor for the combination of existential and socio-political absurdity that may be seen to characterise our lives. The drone represents the fundamental meaninglessness under which we all equally live and die; the trilling higher notes of the chanter represent continually shifting yet ever-present baseless power/knowledge imbalances that unfairly afflict some more than others.
So what is anarchism?
Anarchism, in the crudest, most wonderfully crass of terms, is the rejection of authority and the assertion and defence of autonomy.
Hearing the drone of existential absurdity, recognising our fundamental equality beneath it with all beings, the spoonbroccolist grasps an anarchist imperative to resist all authority as unjustifiable. Here the spoonbroccolist seeks to realise a world that embraces the essential equality of all absurd beings more fully in reality, pushing the sound holes of the screeching chanter of socio-political absurdity in search of greater harmony, or at least a more obvious disharmony that may allow more widespread consideration of the shared ridiculousness of being and subsequent bald injustice of polarized wealth and power.
And what is pragmatism?
Pragmatism is in essence the practice of paying attention to the possible practical applications of a theory or ideology.
With regards to the combination of absurdism and anarchism already outlaid, pragmatism enters the equation with the recognition that however hard we strive for the abolition of hegemonic notions of ‘sense’ and the power structures they undergird, normative frameworks that enable and legitimate oppression and inequality inevitably persist, if potentially in an altered or mitigated form.
The number of hungry people sleeping outside the empty security-protected spare homes of the super rich; the number of sick people dying on the steps of private hospitals or under the camera lens of the tourist who yes could afford their vaccinations or anti-malarials; the number of indigenous protectors of rainforests, prairies, rivers and other ongoingly colonized lands and waters disappeared into the night air; the number of people murdered for the colour of their skin, their chosen gender, or the form of consensual sex that they enjoy – all these socio-politically absurd numbers may fall or may rise yet further.
This is to note that throughout history there has been no absolute cure for oppression, though in different times and contexts the level of inequality has been altered significantly, and often as a result of deliberate political and cultural action. The spoonbroccolist, rather than pitching their teeth in the unspeakably juicy peach of utopia, thus considers how to undermine and undo the hegemonic normalisation of oppression and smash frames of constructed ‘normality’ as wholly as possible through transgressive actions.
A perfect peach can never exist, yet rotten peaches and sublimely succulent peaches certainly can and do – and here yonder comes a grand octopus juggling just such imperfect peaches, a pragmatic absurdo-anarchist cephalopod attempting to condense their realization of interlinked existential and socio-political absurdity into an act that cuts through the mirage of ‘sense’ and turns the befuddled questions of onlookers – ‘Why?’ – back onto them – ‘Why not? Why question this and not the everyday violence that surrounds us?’
Such peach pips planted within the minds of more beings are the seeds of the absurdo-anarchist ideal of total poetic liberation.
Total poetic liberation would be the moment where all beings embrace that there is no sense in anything and allow all claims to power to dissolve around them and flow into a surging current of perfect peach juice carrying rafts not just of juggling octopi but dancing porcupines, sculpting giant crabs, farming bears, drumming dragonflies, and countless other creative creatures alongside the full flourishing diversity of all life forms interlinked in unfailing networks of mutual aid. Here all the incongruous inexplicable simultaneity of beings and doings would rush at once in celebration of their shared wondrous nothingness.
This dream of the pure, naïve absurdo-anarchist is unattainable.
Our rivers are each day more toxic and porcupines rarely dance.
The spoonbroccolist or pragmatic-absurdo-anarchist acknowledges this impossibility of total poetic liberation but pursues it anyway. They create supersensible actions and objects: doings and makings that go beyond conventional conceptions of the sensible. In so doing they minimize assimilation to normative orders that exhort their compromise and potentially push some further seeds of imagination and dissidence into the minds of more beings, whose awkward shoots may yet grow to stunt the running of the hegemonic machine a little further.
In this way, taking the exaggerated transgression of normative structures as their practice, the spoonbroccolist paradoxically becomes an enigma in attempted provocation of the (im)possible mass realization that the underlying, equalizing enigma is existence itself.
Dialectic progression towards inevitable (r)evolution or apocalypse is chewed up by the spoonbroccolist and spat out in globs that (dis)align to form a supersensible script that may inspire a tragicomic intermingling of both hope and despair, fascination and boredom, love and gloom.
A spoonbroccolist or pragmatic-absurdo-anarchist act is thus one that sees the ultimate equality of all beings within meaninglessness, seeking as such to undermine and deconstruct all normative hierarchal artifices, whilst at the same time acknowledging the impossibility of such total deconstruction of power/knowledge, yet continuing in the attempt regardless, going nowhere but getting somewhere, both laughing and crying along the (no)way.
A spoonbroccolist is a co-maker of counterhegemonic (non)meaning. For now, such pragmatic-absurdo-anarchist art and performance may keep our hearts pumping to queer and unruly rhythms while our bodies, and some bodies much more than others, remain in chains. The hope, emboldened by each courageous creative act of transgressive and compassionate non-compliance, is that we may get closer and closer to conditions where we will all be able to make our shackles into puppets. This spoonbroccolist manifes-toe is an invitation to join in creating transgressive actions and things that might tickle our world towards a more radical celebration of the endlessly diverse potentialities of mutually compassionate absurd being. We must keep trying to sing the glorious gibberish of a universal love that embraces its own meaninglessness. Together we are not only stronger, but stranger too.
