PROJECTS | The Savage, the Fool and the Bear
Savages, Fools and Bears are characters that come from the dawn of time. They are represented in traditional myths and ancestral rites all over the world as anthropological masks that sometimes are very similar one to the other.
It is quite impossible to know the certain age of their origins and they have been found in Countries that have had no contact with each others. Anthropologists don’t have a unique explanation for this. The only certain thing is that the Mask is a bridge between the Man and the Nature / God and that the deepest instincts of the human race have been remained the same in times. A man who wears a Mask is hidden behind it and nobody knows his real identity. A man with a mask becomes something different from himself as there is a metamorphosis int the Beast, he comes closer to the Underworld. Starting from the western world’s fear of the covered face, I have found an incredible treasure of Savages, Fools and Bears living in ancestral ceremonies and pagan rites that sometimes have turned into Christian ones. This creatures live in very small villages, mostly in the remotest mountain regions where the inhabitants represent them in folkloristic or religious rituals once a year, trying to preserve theese fading traditions. Each mask is unique and every ritual is different in each place but it represents always a reconciliation between Men and Nature or between Men and Divine.
The Masks are creatures of a parallel universe. They live inside every human being, they are the expression of our deepest and very ancestral instincts. Beasts, or Monsters, that do not have to hide the Man inside of them.
