Masks

The mask was born in a world where the Gods lived in the waters, fields and forests, while the men remained in a state of fusion with a nurturing, threatening nature, they tried to tame and integrate. It helped, for centuries, in this wilderness, to mediate in the relation to the Other, without word or glance, as if we had to become deaf and blind to perceive.
Maybe the path of the mask crosses that of the mirror, just at the moment when the separation takes place by the look between subject and object, inevitably leaving an aftertaste of the Other and a permanent search for the original fusion.
This is the evil eye of the monster snake-haired that freezes the unfortunate, who petrifies forever by enclosing it, stunned, at the mirror stage.
Ovid tells us the victory of Perseus over Medusa, with the bronze mirror of the shield he carried in his left arm.
Is it the attempt to integrate the space of the Other in his own, the realisation of the impossible marriage of opposites that our psyche is striving to achieve throughout life?
The Mask of Medusa, symbol of the vagina as part of a phallic speech, with haggard eyes, bears marks of psychosis, from which it saved us.
Today, with our mask, we share the same body; we have integrated it on our shield of Athena, trying, like our ancestors, to overcome our fears and to search the Other within us.
Let’s put on the masks so that the individual survives. Let's drop the masks so that the individual arises. Here is the contradiction inherent to our condition.