The WonderMask Pilgrimage
Presented at the Chicago Cultural Center - Potential Energy curated by Grace Needleman and Will Bishop
In collaboration with the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival
The WonderMask Pilgrimage is a processional performance by Alonso Galue that merges ancestral ritual with public intervention. Wearing a towering handmade mask—crafted from cardboard, and tape—Galue leads a poetic journey through the city, transforming urban spaces into sites of remembrance and resistance.
Rooted in Andean mythologies and Latin American protest traditions, the pilgrimage unfolds across cultural landmarks in Chicago, pausing at each site for intimate acts of storytelling and symbolic offering. The mask becomes a guide—a sacred object that channels the weight of displacement, the dignity of survival, and the dreams of those forced to migrate.
Presented in collaboration with the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival at the Chicago Cultural Center, the performance invites audiences to walk alongside the masked figure, witnessing a living ritual that blends the sacred and the political. Each step carries the stories of exile, community, and the search for belonging.
Through The WonderMask Pilgrimage, Galue calls on the city to listen to the silence between footsteps in a crowded city.
The masks were made during Studio Sundays Mask Making Workshop lead by him in which participants developed their own mythical creatures.