temporary autonomous art

Temporary Autonomous Art (TAA) is a DIY underground arts festival that has been taking place in reclaimed spaces across the UK since 2001 and which Huge Sillytoe has been involved with since 2019.

In 2019 Huge created the new work ‘Hot Tongues’, exploring themes of language, identity, (mis)communication, saliva, folklore, woodpeckers, and the inexpressible. A collective chant was initiated with the audience of the word tongue in over a hundred languages whilst the entire room was wrapped inside a giant felt tongue and many tongue shaped puppets fell from the ceiling to be tossed around to the rhythm of the tongue-sound-chorus.

The tongue is the longest muscle in the human body. If all human tongues were laid end to end they would orbit the earth over 150,000 times in an enormous tongue superhighway. If all tongues of all creatures human and non-human were laid end to end, the entire notion of time and space would dissolve. Woodpeckers wrap their tongues around their brains to absorb shock whilst hammering their heads against tree trunks. This is also why some people do not wear bicycle helmets. The tongues of some species of butterfly are over twice the length of their bodies. This is also why some people find it hard to express their emotions. Every tongue is a unique biome with its own chemical composition. This is also why the soil in different places lends itself to different crops.

In 2021 Huge staged the participatory happening ‘The Beasts Within The Branches’ that invited collective consideration of themes of (de)toxicity, (re)growth, and freedom in times of ecological disaster. Each person taking a branch harvested from a woodland grown on top of a toxic dump, the audience transformed in to a forest. Shadowy creatures began to be identified amongst the canopy before being drawn down to be embodied in the movements and sounds of the jungle of people. As the branches fall, a selection of seeds is sewn in to outstretched palms.