“Ritual is intimately connected with the mask, either in the wearing that hides the true face, or in the adoption of a public face.” – Subhash Kak, ‘Ritual, Masks and Sacrifice’ (2004)
“Masks are boundary objects, mediating between ideas of contamination and con-
tainment, purity and pollutions, and life and death. Since the outbreak of COVID‐19, however, they perform a new kind of boundary work: they demarcate and negotiate the relationship not only between the body and the body politic, the individual citizen and the national whole. In the hands of politicians, the political logic of masking reinforces other governmental practices – from the imposition of travel bans, the neglect of migrant populations and stigmatisation of certain minorities – in defining the permeable boundaries between nation and self, self and other from the invading virus.” – Nicolette Makovicky, ‘The national[ist] necropolitics of masks’ (2020)
“I wish to underline that the configuration of this apparatus as a mask of reason was predicated upon the redefinition of what pertains to reason and what not. If it could defend doctors and the general population from plague, this was possible only because it both stopped germs from entering the human body and transformed the public from a superstitious and ignorant mass into an enlightened hygienic-minded population: a population that accepted the contagious nature of the disease and corresponding, often brutal, quarantine and isolation measures.” – Christos Lynteris, ‘Plague Masks: The Visual Emergence of Anti-Epidemic Personal Protection Equipment’ (2020)
“The mask works by concealing or modifying those signs of identity which conventionally display the actor, and by presenting new values that, again conventionally, represent the transformed person or an entirely new identity.” – Donald Pollock, ‘Masks and the Semiotics of Identity’ (1995)
Framing the Moment 