Ferdinando Falossi – Fernando Mastropasqua
L’INCANTO DELLA MASCHERA

Description

Everywhere the appearance of the mask arouses restlessness and contrasting senses of bewilderment, amazement, admiration. It is the enchantment that the Greeks called thauma, a word that characterized the inexpressible, the unheard of, a word that announced a place of wonders, fascination, charms, and also, for Father Gregorio di Nazianzo, the fulfillment of the Christian miracle. The mask is the most ancient and universal symbol of the conscience of human finitude (‘better not to be born’), for this reason it covers the perishable body of man with an ‘immortal’ cortex, as the golden funerary masks hid the face decaying of the dead; and it is also the first perfect realization of a ‘time machine’: slipping into a mask transcends the self, space and time. Among the infinite variety of forms, some of its many charms are collected here: from archaic cults and ancestral rites to the myths of classical culture, from epiphanies in European folklore to circus ghosts. The loss of aura in modern society forces the mask into unusual spaces and deep degeneration. However, its presence in many carnivals spared from tourist commodification and in the scenic practice more attentive to experimentation, in the footsteps of Craig, Mejerchold, Brecht, no less than in the ‘indignant’ squares or in the forests of insurgent Chiapas, makes the invocation still relevant. of Shakespearean Mercutio: “Give me a case to put my face in! One face on one face.”