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 extasis 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 surpassed 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 globalizers and the globalized.
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 in the knowledge of everything that surrounds.
Masks are mirrors upon which appearance is reflected in order that it bursts into the thousand edges of the hidden reality.
Masks are neither good or bad, beautiful or 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 things.
Hiding goes beyond transfiguration to allow the emergence of the being that really wants to come out, the magic dimension of the mask. Masks are equal to the cocoon of a new personality.
We 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 iniciate 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 globalized, the desirable intercultural exchange 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 García Fajardo
Profesor of Contemporary Social and Political Thought. CCS Director
Translated by Carlos Miguélez
fajardoccs@solidarios.org.es