Cosecha de Rostros: community mask-making and collective storytelling

Whilst developing the exhibit Cosecha de Rostros (Harvest of Faces) in January and February 2020, Huge Sillytoe facilitated mask-making sessions with all of the groups that make up the Huerto Roma Verde community garden where they were artist in residence. The cleaning staff, the administration, the ceramics workshop, the kindergarten, the recycling centre, the gardeners, the textile workshop, the security, and other groups all sat down for a few hours each with Huge to stick, sew, and shape a new face for themselves whilst sharing stories of what brought them to form part of the community garden. The resulting exhibit included the masks themselves and audio snippets of the stories shared, alongside a mosaic of double portraits of each person with and without their mask. Huge frames such community mask-making as a visual-anthropological method for telling the interwoven tales of a community and representing each individual’s multifaceted contribution to the collective character of a group.