Portals to Symbiofutures. A Mask-Wearer and Mask-Maker Dialogue on Becoming Other

Using a double-voiced narration as self-ethnography, the paper draws on our individual practices across the fields of performance, craft, and ethnology, as well as on territories where they overlap: on one side, mask-making, and on the other, mask-wearing. We reflect on how masks (face-masks and mask-costumes) have found their way into our work as the duo behind “Plastic Art Performance collective”, an (eco)art group that emerged in 2020 within the Bucharest performance art scene which works to connect body practices to ecological consciousness. We explore, on the one hand, performative processes of becoming Other: the means of transformation that masks have enabled in our practice and what happens to the body as it undergoes these masked transformations. We consider the relationship between performativity and agency and reflect on the processes and methods of embodiment we have experimented with and their relationship to masking. On the other hand, we delve into the raw matter of the mask-making process: resources, materials, and circularity. This piece offers insight into a particular use of masks as both narrative devices and political objects that signal larger-scale issues such as overconsumption, waste, pollution, deforestation, and abusive human interventions in the ecosphere. In doing so, we ask what happens to masks as they become vehicles not only for becoming another body, but also tools for larger social transformations.