19/04/2026
“Beneath the mask: a mythology of Instinct and Becoming”.
In my photographic practice, the use of animal masks is not an aesthetic gimmick but a deliberate metaphoric language—what I think of as a kind of personal *mythopoeia*. Each image becomes a fragment of a larger, evolving mythology, one that attempts to peel back the fragile veneer of human identity and reveal something more instinctual, more ancient, and perhaps more honest.
At the core of this work lies a simple but unsettling idea: beneath the architecture of our intellect, beneath culture and constructed selfhood, we remain animals. Consciousness may give us the illusion of distance from that truth, yet the body remembers. The impulses persist. The masks, then, do not conceal—they expose.
The baboon mask embodies this confrontation most directly. It is a symbol of repressed sensuality, of the raw, often uncomfortable proximity between sexuality and animality. In wearing it, the subject steps into a space where social codes dissolve, where desire is no longer neatly packaged or controlled. The baboon becomes a mirror reflecting the instincts we are taught to suppress, asking whether repression refines us—or merely distances us from ourselves.
The bat, by contrast, shifts the exploration toward perception. Associated with darkness and disorientation, it challenges the dominance of vision as our primary way of understanding the world. The bat does not see in the conventional sense—it navigates through echoes, through invisible structures. In this way, the mask becomes a tool for imagining alternative modes of awareness. It suggests that reality is far richer than what appears on the surface, and that by relinquishing our reliance on form, we might access deeper layers of experience.
The rabbit introduces yet another dimension: that of magic and liminality. Neither entirely wild nor fully domesticated, the rabbit occupies a threshold space. It evokes transformation, play, and the uncanny. In these images, the rabbit is less about instinct and more about possibility—the capacity to slip between worlds, to embrace the irrational, and to rediscover a sense of wonder that adulthood often erodes.
Across all these figures, there is a shared tension between the human and the non-human, the rational and the instinctual, the known and the unknowable. The masks do not resolve this tension; they amplify it. They invite the viewer to question where identity truly resides. Is it in the face we present, or in the impulses we hide? In the mind that categorizes, or in the body that feels?
Ultimately, this work is not about animals—it is about what remains when we stop pretending we are separate from them. It is about recognizing that we are not fixed beings, but shifting constellations of instinct, perception, and imagination, suspended in a vast and indifferent universe. The masks simply make that condition visible.
