rebel strands

As part of their work as artist-in-residence on the Circulart 3.0 project of Fashion B.E.S.T. at Fondazione Pistoletto Cittadellarte, Huge Sillytoe became fascinated with a material that they name ‘rebel strands’, observed during their site visits to textile factories across Italy and Austria. ‘Rebel strands’ are strips, shreds, and slivers of material that refuse to conform to the mechanical processes to which they are attempted to be subjected. Such scraps and slices of loose thread and wayward weave stick to the frames of the machines, peel off onto the floors, even sometimes jam the system entirely.

Huge Sillytoe used over two tonnes of such rebel strands in shades of yellow collected from collaborating textile factories to build their installation Rebel Strand Mountain for the Arte al Centro exhibition at Fondazione Pistoletto Cittadellarte, Biella, Italy, June – December 2023. As part of this same project, Huge Sillytoe staged a durational street performance of six hours on Via Italia, the central street of Biella, where they slowly covered their entire body in a mound of the yellow rebel strands, communicating with passersby in the supersensible language of Toetapoelib. This rebel strand mound disrupted the normative flow of street traffic in echo of the strands’ initial disruption of the mechanical processes of the factories they were salvaged from – raising questions from onlookers such as ‘Why is he doing this?’, ‘What is he trying to say?’, and ‘Is he supposed to be spaghetti?’

Videos and photos: Alejandro Chellet.