The Whitened Face as a Visual Gap: Thoughts and Methods

White face-masks and white face-paint have been used in different cultural contexts long before the increasingly racial discourses of positivism andcolonialism started mapping people into anthropometric categories. Japanese Nô theatre, French mime, Punu stilt dance, Shamanistic ceremonies, Carnivalprocessions and Death rituals equally turn the face of the performer into a whitescreen onto which viewers can project images conjured up by the respectiveperformance. The theoretical part of this project compares context and effect of different white-face personas in white and non-white cultures on the basis of how these visual tropes have been photographically represented. In particular I look at the following aspects: the emptiness of the masked face, the stillness of the painted face, and the ambivalence of the inverted mask. The practice part consists of a photographic exploration of the symbolic figures that lie at the core of Whitened Faces by cross-referencing their diverse cultural histories in the form of an impossible genealogy of reoccurring visual themes, evoking many fluid variations and incantations echoing across time and space. I see my exploration of the ubiquitous iconology of these white-face personas as a form of sighting, archiving and re-disseminating figures that are in many ways haunted by themselves, thus proposing a crosscultural and intertextual anthropological paradigm. The social and photographic significance of the project lies in the ways in which I reassemble disparate partial meanings of these Whitened Faces, deconstructing the cultural, social and at times racial histories they purport to tell.

About the book: Unsettling Whiteness brings together an international collection that considers anew the politics, practices and representations of whiteness at a time when nations worldwide continue to grapple with issues that are underwritten by whiteness. It draws together case studies of the performance of whiteness from significantly different political and social contexts with shared purpose; to investigate (re)constructions of whiteness, to explore the mechanisms which give whiteness power (and make power itself whitened), and to dissect the social processes through which whiteness is made visible and invisible. The collection makes a significant contribution to contemporary debates on whiteness by unsettling historical definitions and examining artistic, intimate and institutional attempts to reinforce or dismantle white norms and privileges. The case studies and analyses offer insightful reading on their own, but together offer a unique transdisciplinary approach to the complex task of exposing, resisting and subverting racialised domination across social relations today.