Eclipse

In 2018, a 9,000-year-old stone mask was discovered. Nine millennia of hiding faces and chasing the idyll of the Other. We were already masked when we saw the first eclipse and, frightened by the superposition of the sun and moon, we ended a battle (1375 BC).

How many identities can coexist in one? Are any of them truer than the rest?

Perhaps the one that appears on our identity card or the one that is hidden in our computer records? If we are masked, what is our identity?

This new project by Matías Umpierrez is an unfinished catalogue of anonymity. It’s a conference. A performance. A concert of fictions.

Onstage, an anonymous lecturer and his double revive the meaning of the word mask by calling it, as in Ancient Greece, “persona” (prósōpon) while weaving together stories of celebrated and forgotten mask-wearers on a transhuman planet eclipsed by screens, leaders, slaves, files, rebellions, ghosts, hacktivists, secret societies, astronauts, deepfakes, myths.