The mask is the history of language; language being that which is unknown to us, language being that which is unknown to us carried out into form. There’s a linked equivocityin the action of unfolding that is no longer a dialogue between folds, between classified entities as taxonomy. It is precisely in the act of repudiation of ourselves as fold; we enable a process which begins by wearing the mask as the act of unfolding; a recognition of ourselves as the previous ritual to the rational dissociation. Wearing the mask is deliberately entering into conversation with the fiction within us, summoning to us the return of that image in which we no longer recognize ourselves; in order to begin the conversation with that which traverses us. In the encounter of two masks, in the meeting of multiple mistakes (in their mutual recognition as mistakes), we no longer witness the encounter of two affirmations, nor the encounter of multiple affirmations in their defiance of identities, in the usual defense of the self and my world (following the movement of anthropocentrism). Instead... two masks encounter themselves to grow in Relation, in that Equivocal relationship between the mask and the mask, between my own mistake and the mistake in the other that begins knitting before us, that common place between differences. The encounter between tree and rain, between wolf and shaman, between word and word, between mistake and mistake, you and me in that lie of language that finally came to recognize herself as lie to know that the truth was not her contrary, but... truth was just the constant moving- encounter between all lies, colliding and becoming- relation. That is how we learn the becoming-jaguar, the wearing of the mask until the translation is multiple, until every conversation becomes conversion, learning the unfold through the inversion of the botanical expedition already in the biased version of history, in the multiple place before the dual colonization that’s still becoming in every alive organism.
And so, in that equivocal relationship of relationships, in that growing mistakes into exponential multiplicities, the will to-not return to the prided Western thought for being intrinsic at its foundation, to not return to his dialectics of objectification and the instrumentalization of all what constitutes the outside of myself. We want to wear the mask from a relational-perspectivism rather than an identitarian affirmation. And walking through that landscape, visiting historical places that serve as testimonies of the impossibility of otherness in the constitution of the modern subject. This, only to reveal the inherent and ongoing construction of the objectified other in the Colonization of yesterday, as today’s comfortable freedom.
The city of Paris hosted the Ethnographic Exhibitions at the end of the 19th century, exposing thousands of individuals shipped from South America, Africa, Middle East and Oceania as exotic attractions to be visited at Human Zoos. France counts with millions of objects exposed in Museums as objects of a relationship that, whilst disguised as Multiculturalism, exerts a with pride an identity that begs to be put into question, that of the Modern subject. We will visit these emplacements as mask and identity in delay.
* NOMASMETAFORAS (Clara Melniczuk and Julian Dupont) is a Colombian-French collective working the hybrid spaces between Contemporary Art, Decolonial Philosophy, Post-structural Anthropology and the question for Indigenous Thought. www.nomasmetaforas.com