Reflection of realities
They are used in the rites of many peoples to express what words can’t reach. Masks dance because the rhythm is the place of encounter between space and eternity. It’s impossible to approach mystery without rhythm and without bare feet. For that reason, people paint their faces, dress up and wear jewellery, the shaman drinks the sacred potion, and they abandon themselves to the drunkenness of the excitement that acts as catharsis. The cycle of being born, of living, dying and resuscitating through visible symbols of invisible realities. Limits are over passed and, in plain freedom, an unidentified language is whispered. Those who haven’t been initiated talk about extreme obsession and even of extravagance. Worse are the barriers that society imposes between the globalisers and the globalised. Masks have no use for hiding one’s face; they allow one to be many
persons and oneself at the same time. Their animalesque, plant, cloud
and monster-like features serve the purpose of exorcising and becoming
other beings while still being one self, and of knowing everything. Masks are neither good nor bad, neither beautiful nor ugly; they express
the horror of imprisoned liberty, of the lost innocence, which will
give light to a new innocence with the awakening of the most authentic
thing. In this section, we will choose to be an anvil before being a hammer. But we will produce sparks from the blows that fall down on people everyday, over the peoples and over a natural environment that cannot take any further aggressions. We will be that scream, those hands that rise, that reflection of a distorted reality that lacks sense because it has lost its harmony. These masks will reflect the reality that cultures, systems and models have imposed. Since we believe hope is possible, we start our path open to all winds and all outcomes, assuming risks because, in times of change, rebellion is a fundamental dimension of human beings. There are essential urgencies. The indigenous person as reality and metaphor of the globalised, the desirable mestizaje more than the inevitable one, so that our sons won’t despise us, because having had so much power in our hands to do so much, we dared to do so little. |
José Carlos Gª Fajardo
This article was published in the Center of Collaborations for Solidarity (CCS) (26/02/2004)