Probably ever since the appearance of mankind, human beings have felt the need to create masks.
First of all,
ritual masks: through that magic object, communities were able to achieve social connections and individual or collective trance.
Later, masks became carnival and theatre objects: thanks to the mask one wears, one
becomes - at least partially - the character one is impersonating.
All throughout the centuries,
masks have
kept both of these functions: they are magical and social objects,
allowing the person who wears them to enter a different condition or
expressivity.
We live in an age
of "compulsory" masks - sanitary masks, of course, but masks
nonetheless - that cover half of our face (mouth and nose) but leave the
other half (eyes and forehead) uncovered. There is a very specific kind
of "traditional" theatre mask that strangely reflects the half-faced
reality we now live in: the Commedia dell’Arte masks. In fact the masks
in Commedia dell’Arte, which appeared during the Renaissance, cover the
exact opposite half of a person’s face: they cover the person’s forehead
and nose, exposing only mouth and chin. There is a slight but important
difference, however: Commedia dell’Arte offers "characterized“
half-masks. Each half-mask
represents a specific character which the person who wears it has to be in dialogue with.
Thanks
to the characterized half-mask one wears - hiding and at the same time
revealing - new forms of expression, of communication and new types of
encounters with others are suddenly possible: through our body, through
our mouth, and maybe, nowadays, through our gaze.
This installation seeks to rediscover these very special traditional masks, and invites us to think about what
Commedia dell’Arte masks can teach us about
what it means to cover - or uncover - our face or part of it.
