Why has the human being had the anthropological, ancestral need to hide their face in certain circumstances? The CCCB attempts to answer this question through the exhibition La màscara no menteix mai (The Mask Never Lies), which can be visited until May 1st. Since the dawn of humanity, the mask has had a religious use and has gradually acquired others. From festive and theatrical, to its use in the practices of secret societies. The mask has been a way to inspire terror, but today, in times of pandemic, it has become an element of defense against a global fragility that the virus has brought to light.
The visitor will not find an integral exhibition on the mask, nor one solely from an anthropological point of view. The exhibition delves into a history that its curators, Jordi Costa and Servando Rocha, describe as "subterranean," in the "desacralized" version of the mask when, in the last 150 years, it "infiltrates" the "political landscape" in the service of "perverse exercises of power."
The exhibition, structured in seven chapters, was inspired by the book Algunas cosas oscuras y peligrosas. El libro de la máscara y los enmascarados (Some Dark and Dangerous Things. The Book of the Mask and the Masked) that Rocha, one of the curators, published in 2019. Thus, throughout the exhibition, the visitor enters dark and unsettling worlds such as those of the Ku Klux Klan, Freemasonry, Fantomas, Mexican wrestling, and Anonymous, among others. All of them represent different ages of the mask and reveal various meanings of face concealment.
The evolution of mask use is evident in organizations like the Ku Klux Klan itself. When it emerged in the late 19th century, it did so, according to the curators, in a carnivalesque context, where hidden faces portrayed Southern soldiers who died in the American Civil War returning from their graves. The current image of the Klan was forged starting in 1915 with D. W. Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation, already with the white habit and Nazarene-style hood attire.
The mask also delves into the criminal universe, and in this section of the exhibition, Fantomas, the king of thieves, takes center stage as the leader of a series of characters who cover their faces with the intention of committing crimes. Here we will meet Eduardo Arcos, a skilled gentleman thief from early 20th-century Spain who camouflaged himself behind black tights and a hood. Arcos claimed to be the true inspiration for the literary character created by Marcel Alain and Pierre Souvestre.
The curators dedicate special attention to Freemasonry, where the mask is used at certain moments of the initiation ceremony. Costa and Rocha focus, however, on what they call "the great fraud" perpetrated at the end of the 19th century by the writer Léo Taxil, the initiator of an anti-Masonic discourse and literature based on what we would today call fakes. Indeed, Taxil exaggerated the ritual practices of the secret society to construct an imaginary that equated Freemasonry with Satanism, taking advantage of a context of rising anti-Semitism and the Catholic Church's confrontation with the lodges. Taxil influenced all subsequent anti-Masonry, including that exercised by Francoism against what it called the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy. The exhibition offers images of a real Masonic temple in contrast to the one the dictatorship reconstructed in the headquarters of the current Salamanca Archive, set with characters in black hoods and a dark and diabolical decoration to inspire the population's rejection of this kind of invisible enemy that the regime blamed for all of Spain's ills.
After an excursion through Mexican wrestling, V for Vendetta, the iconic comic by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, and the Anonymous movement, the exhibition has no choice but to conclude with the installation of an enormous surgical mask to reflect on its use in the pandemic. It was an unwritten chapter, but one that had to be included as the culmination of the exhibition. The surgical mask has today become the most global mask in history due to the irruption of Covid-19 and its mutations. Do we wear it out of fear or responsibility? Is it a means of political control over the population?
In any case, the pandemic has produced a reversal in the meaning of the mask. If until now it had been an instrument generating fear, clandestinity, and danger, today it identifies us as supportive members of a community vulnerable to the virus, so that the bare face now causes us the disturbance and unease that was associated with the mask.
Like every CCCB exhibition, we cannot miss it.