residencies and scholarships
Folie/Culture, Quebec City
Working in virtual residency with Folie/Culture between 3rd and 17th November 2020, Huge Sillytoe facilitated (no)work(no)shops concerning monsterly self-transformation and celebration with groups of (super)human beings in Quebec City and London. Here people were invited to embrace and amplify their shared beautiful monstrousness. Following the pandemic restrictions in each nation at the time, participants in Quebec conducted individual supersensible experiments from their homes and created video reports of their (not)findings, whilst a group living together within the House of Free Massag artists’ community conducted a monsterly drift investigation across East London culminating in a verbatim opera of their (not)findings as their daily legally-permitted outdoor exercise on Friday 13th November 2020. All these elements are blended together in the above video summary of collective (not)findings. The investigation goes on!
Casa Viva and Huerto Roma Verde, Mexico City
During January and February 2020, Huge Sillytoe was the artist in residence at Casa Viva and Huerto Roma Verde in Mexico City, working during that period to co-organize the international political performance festival Artivismo MX, develop and present the new performance ‘¿Con cuál cuchara come el sol?‘ (With which spoon does the sun eat?), and make masks and collect stories with all of the workers of Huerto Roma Verde to inform the exhibit ‘Cosecha de rostros‘ (Harvest of faces).
Grace Exhibition Space, New York City
For three months during 2019, Huge Sillytoe held an office hours residency at Grace Exhibition Space. The following excerpt from their PhD thesis summarizes their performance writing practice during this period:
“I set up a desk in the street-facing window of the old pizza shop turned gallery, surrounded by my central research questions written on cardboard in English and Spanish, and worked at my computer in rotating costumes and masks. Passersby at different moments encountered a spoon, a frog, a clown, or a fully suited man with underpants on his head, amongst numerous other unidentified creatures, working studiously. Thus many sections of this text, composed to meet the meticulous professional standards of a PhD thesis, were written with a pair of underpants on my head in a shop window. The text of a sign attached to my computer read “Why? Why not? Por qué? Por qué no?” descending into illegible nonsense script. One pedestrian, putting a note in the cookie jar I provided for comments and questions wrote: “This seems like some kind of protest”. I thus attempted to transform the condensation of exaggeratedly transgressive performance into a relatively normative academic text into a further opportunity for counter-normative intervention in public space. Here I hope to blur the boundary between creating and writing about absurd performance whilst querying through action the political motivations and import of both.”
MKA: Theatre of New Writing, Melbourne
During July and August 2016, Huge Sillytoe was artist in residence at MKA: Theatre of New Writing, developing and presenting the new work One Tonne Fruit Bowl as part of Hot! Hot! Hot! Climate Arts Festival.
academic scholarships
As an academic researcher, Huge Sillytoe has been supported by numerous scholarships including the King’s Scholar award from King’s College, Cambridge during their undergraduate studies, a University of Chicago full tuition scholarship and International House residential fellowship during their masters studies, and an Arts and Humanities Research Council scholarship during their PhD research.