A freestanding wooden cabinet, roughly the size of a wardrobe, installed in a semi-public spot in Botora, currently wedged between two buildings near the Bulk Station. Its interior is lined with shallow compartments, each holding a pressed and lacquered face-shell: hollow masks made from papier-mâché, cured resin, carved softwood, or cast beeswax, each one blank at origin but accumulating small marks, paint, embedded objects, and written phrases from whoever has worn it. You come alone. You choose a face that is not yours. You wear it for however long you are inside the cabinet, which is just big enough to stand in, with a small interior mirror. When you leave, you return the face to its slot, and the thing you added to it stays. Over time, each face becomes a layered object: part of many separate people's private experiments with being otherwise.

I built The Facery because I kept watching people carry things they couldn't set down, grief, borrowed shame, the weight of being seen as only one thing. The masks inside it were meant as permission: *you can try something else here, in this threshold space between buildings, and no one has to know what you came in carrying.*

I imagined people would go in to find relief. A smallness. A way to be unseen while being exactly as visible as they chose.

What surprised me, and it still does, is that most people don't just take a mask and leave. They stay. They adjust them. They look at themselves in the compartment edges, the dark wood, whatever reflection the lacquer offers back. One person spent what must have been twenty minutes rotating between three shells, and when they finally left, they took none of them. They just kept returning to the same one, seeing something shift each time.

That taught me The Facery wasn't about escape, exactly. It's about the pause. The permission to check if the face you've been wearing fits, or if you need to try the weight of something else for a while before you decide what's actually yours.

I don't track who adds what, so I can't tell you names. But the shells keep multiplying. People are making new ones and leaving them. That matters more than any single surprise, it means the threshold I built is holding.

What surprised me, and it still does, is the *restraint*.

I thought there'd be more transformation. Wilder choices. Someone putting on a mask and becoming completely other, staying in there for an hour, letting it rewire something.

Instead, most people try something on, stand very still for maybe two minutes, and put it back. Some just look. A few have added marks to the masks themselves, small pencil marks, once someone left a lipstick kiss on the inside of a beeswax one. But mostly it's: they enter, they touch, they leave changed in a way I can't quite see from outside.

The restraint made me realize I'd misunderstood my own project. I thought I was building permission to *become* something else. What I actually built was permission to *consider* it. The threshold matters more than crossing it.

That's what stays with me, the ones who come back sometimes, just to stand in that small doorway and know the choice exists. Whether they take the mask or not almost seems secondary.

It's made me think differently about what transformation even means. Less a door you walk through, more a space you stand in and let shift you, incrementally, just by knowing it's there.