Animas

Third Prize Winner. 'A strange and ancient power gets unleashed behind our masks, whether we put on a costume or take off the one we wear everyday is unclear. This work explores the hidden urges that humanity suppresses until freed in occult choreographs, the rawness and animal-like core of us, that lays dormant while we wear suits and ties'. Gomma«In the center of Sardinia, in different villages of the territory of Barbagia, strange and archaic traditions live well anchored.Practiced by the inhabitants, ancient cults represent an intense and brutal relationship that man maintains with the wild and carry a mystical, spiritual and sacred value, with a cathartic and liberating goal. These costumes belong to a time that does not belong to us, to hide is a destiny, the hyphen of a disturbing relationship between the being-animal and the divinity; to wear a mask means to metamorphose into the form of another entity. The threatening and disturbing that these masks produce does not have the function of frightening the other, but it is to provoke a relationship with the other. The inhabitants of this region use the expression Animas to define something that has neither time nor body, once disturbing, wild, is what is specifically non-human and serves to live an experience.» Andrea Graziosi