The mask no longer consists of feathers, hides, stones, and wood. The mask, in its materially specific, northern Mexican iterations, now cites popular culture, gore, and Narco[1]. At first notice, these alternations seem unsurprising: the realm of quotidian culture is not severed from its more ‘traditional’, sedimented, or rooted counterpart[2]. However, we deem these shifts relevant as they not only alter the role of mask as an artistic object, but also bespeak a shift in the economies of violence that inform the symbolism of these ‘objects’.

In the Fariseo tradition of Sonora, this gradual replacement assumes a distinct form. Dating back to Colombian Jesuit settlements in the region, the Fariseo represents the sinful side of the Christian Manichean divide. In anticipation of the Easter festivities, these figures, traditionally clad in pre-Colombian costumes, haunt the villages of the region. During forty days bereft of alcohol, sexual encounters, and personal hygiene, they remind the community of the fragile boundary between vice and virtue. They occupy the streets, molest their neighbours, rattle their cascabeles, and plead for divine favours. Eventually, their calls will be answered and the demons– exorcized. Ultimately, these festivities culminate in the Pascola, a masked dance that celebrates the victory over the enemies of Christ. As a last climax, the masks of the Fariseos are burnt, cleansing the community for the coming year. The Fariseo, who, thanks to the divine favours received, has restored his posture, now finds himself on the ‘correct’ side of the Christian Manicheism and hands his mask to the fire.

More recently, many Fariseos are no longer dressed in furs and hides, the masks are no longer carved of wood, representing complex anthropomorphic depictions of the animal-kingdom. Rather, they are replaced by a representation of the latest B-movie protagonist, sporting tactical gear. The Fariseo is still supposed to remind the community of their sins but now engages in a mimesis of urban warfare where terror is more relevant than expiation. This type of Fariseo lashes out at its community-members, grabs genitals, screams. The syncretism that accompanies and, at times, fashions the complex genealogy of the mask, has evolved into Narco-syncretism.

In its Prehispanic context, the mask had a precisely designated function, consisting of a register of symbolic connections with what one could colloquially term the divine. These masks were embedded in specific rituals that attempted to maintain or reconfigure the fragile connection between the finite and the infinite. This connection was to be cherished, to impede the potential wrath of both the natural and the supra-natural. 

An exemplary ritual can be found in remote communities of Guerrero and Morelos. Here, it is the jaguar that needs to be pacified. In Nahua cosmogony, the Tecuan or Tecuani (the devourer of humans) is associated with the night, the obscure, the opaque. The jaguar is thus perceived as a creature that traverses the boundaries between ethereal existence and the beyond, knowledgeable about the complex topography of existence, spanning the subterranean and the infra-structural.

Anticipating a confrontation, the mask-makers of the region dedicate themselves to crafting hides and masks, drawing from the appearance of the Tecuan. During a period of high symbolic and material tension, men assemble in caves beyond the confines of the village and transform into the jaguar. They then descend upon the village to engage in a heated confrontation with the villagers where the jaguar will ultimately loose, where blood will be spilt, and where the coming harvest is to be secured from impending attacks.

These rituals are bound to be lost, summoning a new narcotic ritual of violence. To attend to this alternation,

we require another conceptual and geographic leap. For the north, Ciudad Juárez has always figured as an open wound, both alluring and frightening. As a gateway to the global south, to carnal pleasures, the night. Simultaneously, the city is one of the privileged examples (a dubious privilege) of the Maquiladora-industry. In this neo-slave system that dates back to the inception of Mercosur, free-trade outposts, or, more precisely, plantations (plantas maquiladoras), have been established. These complexes dot the city. Every one of them housing dozens of individual workshops. Catering to the extractivist world(s), these workshops contain thousands of workers, predominantly female, rarely leaving the compound. Enticed by the promise of a house and a life beyond subsistence, these workers left their rural context to ultimately sell themselves to a dehumanizing system.

Welcomed by housing-quarters with individual units of eight or ten square-metres, these complexes serve as ghettos, only to be left for work. Ultimately, the Maquiladora establishes its own regime of objectivation where subjectivity is in constant dispute and where the velocity of the assembly-line figures as the pacemaker of a morbid organism.

Juárez has become the kidney of the US; not only does it provide consumption-goods for the low-cost enjoyment of the north, it also receives the refuse that results from this dubious exchange. New goods leave the city, trash returns. After an initial processing, this trash gathers in the scrapyards (deshuesaderos) of the city. Here, the presumably dysfunctional scraps of consumption are reclassified, ordered, repurposed. Here, the objects –disconfigured into their constituent parts– assume an afterlife. This reclassification divides the toxic from the non-toxic, the recyclable from the lost, the useful from the useless. In this ruinous undertaking, existences are etched from the waste, health is compromised and the refuse returns into the cycles of production.

A particular fraction of society forms these economic appendices of the Maquiladora. The most ravaged roam the streets, in search of base material. They collect junk in exchange for a few pesos, they clear the streets of garbage. After reclassification, the mounds of separated material will be sold. A new waste-cycle begins, consuming workers, culminating in the next expendable good. It is from this context that the material for these masks has been gathered.

These masks –whether part of a legacy of Arte Povera or not– represent the status of the third world’s contemporary iconography. They do so not by means of a plastic symbolic connection but through an allegorical register of critique. Through these masks, waste assumes an afterlife that does not represent decay but the peculiar timescale that metal and plastic bespeak. In a context where finitude assumes such a fragile shape, where death often looms at the corner, where alternative sovereign forms (Narco) undermine the violent monopoly of the state, the mask speaks of a silenced heritage that stretches beyond the fragility of individual existence. These muted traces still linger in vestiges of this part of the globe. These mask thus connect to a withering, and largely destroyed archive. The contemporary mask is no longer made of stone; it is made of refuse. While this refuse refuses to be perceived as the enunciation of a new archive (with its associated rattail of dominance and fever), it is savvy of the critical need to mask oneself, in times of peril.

There is another layer that renders the morphological capacity of the deshuesadero a crucial topos of this undertaking. Juárez is a place of transit. While the violence has largely chocked the influx of carnal nihilism from the north, the migration from the south remains omnipresent. Waiting for a chance to risk their lives at an attempt at crossing, these migrants attempt to make a humble living before their time comes. The deshuesadero is one of several places of refuge, where different skills are needed and where every hand can sully itself in one of the countless backyards of capitalism.

Narrations of violence intersect at these places[3]. The violence of origin crosses with the violence of passage, remaining stuck in the exorbitant violence of a city where sovereignty is in constant dispute and where the monopoly of brutality has been decentralized. It is here that we meet the co-creators of these masks: migrants who contribute their histories, their tacit knowledge of rituals and sacrifice. These artisans –wrested from their context– solder, hammer, connect that which has been connected by an archipelago of suffering but which is yet to assume concrete form.  

Roaming through the refuse we find simulacra of ancient iconography. These simulacra interact with a peculiar economy of objectification where the branded goods have long become the new gods, albeit of a post-theological providence. Here, in the ruins of capitalist virility, the sludge of a denigrated and decentral symbolic morphology gathers. It is on the mask-maker to gather these fragments and to let them assume a new critical form.

As the connection between the structural and the infra-structural, between the physical and the supra-physical have long been severed, these masks are no longer tied to a clearly demarcated register of rituals. Instead, they gather compromised traces (which, perhaps, have never been intact)[4]. They assemble them into a new form of sculpture, one that cannot be confined to the sacrificial halls of the museum, but one that is corporealized, that lives through death and dies through living.

Narco, in the guise of a globalized aesthetic register of violence, now dictates the contemporary artistic register of the region. It is no longer ‘solely’ pre-Colombian-Christian syncretism that dictates the artistic repertoire. Instead, an intensification, or a pseudo-democratization of violence guides both the reception and the production of the artistic object. Should this new form of mask-making have concrete ritualist traces, then they lie in the generative potential of refusing complicity via an assembled ‘object’, belonging to a corporal and post-mythical narrative that reaches beyond an economy of violence. 

[1] In noting this, we are not gesturing towards a genealogy of the mask, but question this novel type of syncretism.

[2] These roots, as Glissant advises, need to be replaced by a more archipelagic understanding of “the local”.

[3] Here, we largely abstain from confronting the concrete, excessive scales of this violence, instead focusing on the influence of these economies on the morphology of the contemporary mask.  

[4] They continue to pose pressing questions: What is the mask? How does it undermine the division between the subject and the object? What is the relevance of disguise?