The oldest human impulse might not be to speak, but to disguise. Long before language, we found ways to become something other than ourselves. Rita Davis thinks about this a lot. She thinks about Carnival and folklore, about Instagram and Estonian winters, about the moment a mask stops being an object and becomes a state of being.
( Diandra Rebase )
Let's start at the beginning. What role have masks played in your life?
( Rita Davis )
They’ve always been there, culturally and within my family, though I never worked around them directly before. More like a general interest with roots in very specific places.
One strong connection is from my dad's side. He's a clown. People tell me that as a child I would see him wearing his clown makeup and cry. So from the very beginning there was this thing of the familiar becoming unfamiliar. And then my grandmother had this enormous collection of masks on a wall in her house. I found old photos of it, completely covered, masks from all different places.
And then there's the Carnival. It happens every year, in February or March, in Brazil. It's this gigantic street party, and also a moment of celebration, of distancing yourself from your life and just embodying whoever you want. Carnival is definitely the time of year where I think about masks more intensely, spend time making them and going out in the streets playing a different character.
( DR )
You mentioned that as a child, seeing your father masked made you cry. There's something in that: the face being the centre of identity, and the mask disrupting that.
( RD )
Exactly. And if it's someone familiar to you, it can be even more unsettling, because you recognise the body, the movements, the behaviour, but the face is telling you something completely different. That contrast is what's so disrupting.
It happens with clowns. The red nose is one of the most important and most recognisable “masks” ever made, and it's tiny, it doesn't even cover the whole face. But that one object changes everything about how you perceive someone. It's extraordinary how much weight something so small can carry.
When the face is covered, what happens to the body?
Something very mysterious. I experienced it in the photo shoot we did together. The moment something was on my face, my body just relaxed. It's hard to explain, but you cover your face and suddenly everything becomes free. You start twisting, moving in ways you wouldn't otherwise. The judgment is no longer on you, and that takes the weight off completely.
I was reading something recently that described the mask as having two sides: the interior face turned toward you, and the exterior face turned toward the world. The mask lives in between. And I think that's what happens. You're not hiding, and you're not exactly performing. You're existing in this threshold space.
Is that the distinction for you, between hiding and revealing?
I see it more as revealing. When you put a mask on, you're not disappearing, you're creating another narrative, another self. You're playing with charac-ters, with stories you want to tell. During the photo shoot I was absolutely lying the whole time, impersonating someone with full commitment. And it felt amazing. I think people should do it more often. Anything works, even a piece of paper attached to your forehead.
There's an interesting paradox in theatre masks: a Noh mask is essentially static, yet it's somehow expressive across hours of performance.
I saw two plays in Japan with that kind of mask, and the expressions are intense, almost extreme, and they don't move at all. You sit there thinking, they're going to perform for two hours like that? But the mask pulls different stories out of itself. The same fixed expression somehow reads differently depending on the moment, the music, the body underneath. You realise that what we think of as "expression" is much more about context than about actual movement of features. It also makes you wonder when humans first discovered that just attaching something to your face would do something. People in so many different cultures arrived at this independently. There must be something fundamental about it.
You brought a very specific mask for the shoot. Can you tell me about it?
Yes! This is a good example of the other use of masks. The colourful fabric mask was made by Dona Meire, a craftwoman I met in the Northeast of Brazil, in the city São Luís do Maranhão, who has been making masks for a long time. She learned the craft from her husband, Mestre Abel Teixeira, who was a very important figure in the region. So, Dona Meire makes them specifically for a festivity called Bumba-meu-Boi. Within that festivity there are many characters, and one of them is the Cazumbá, which my mask is based on. The Cazumbá is mysterious. It is described as not being man, woman, or animal. It's a magical and lucid being, a fusion of human and animal spirits, existing on the threshold between the sacred and the profane, between saint and devil. A liminal non-binary entity. And it's a very playful character too, quite mischievous. When you put this mask on, you don't just wear it. You become Cazumbá. People who perform this character need to prepare themselves spiritually before entering it, and then slowly come back out of it afterwards. That is because it can be intense… religiously, spiritually, emotionally. During the festival, the music is playing very loudly, people are dancing, and for hours they are embodying this character. The mask is not a costume accessory. It's an activation of something, an ancient story.
That's so different from how we often think about masks in Western culture, as objects rather than states.
Yes, and that distinction is everything. In many traditions, the mask carries the weight of past generations, stories, and prayers. There's a whole process of respect and preparation around putting it on. It's not "I want to dress up as a nurse for a party." It's encountering an entity. You become a vessel for something bigger than yourself. A messenger. I'm very drawn to this use of masks. The idea that the entity exists, rests, and then you activate it. That's so different to using a mask as decoration.
You've been learning the craft of the mask yourself. How did that come about?
I visit that region of Brazil (the state of Maranhão) often, and I wanted to learn directly from Dona Meire and other very talented and generous craft people. She makes everything herself, the embroidery, all the details. Her masks can be quite large and very heavy – covered in fabric, beads, mirrors, and with very vibrant colours – the shape blending human and animal forms. I asked her to make only the basic structure, the base, so that I could embroider it myself. So mine is still bare. She says that it is "naked." I want to explore what I can do with it, and hopefully when I go back there, I can experience the mask in its proper context.
The pandemic brought masks into everyday life in a different way. You started a project during that time?
Yes, Mascorona. I started this curatorial project during Covid with two friends, also graphic designers, Filipe Lampejo and João Emediato. It began when I saw a paper bag mask by the Romanian-American cartoonist Saul Steinberg, from his Masquerade series in the late 1950s. It was very simple, with just a hole for the nose. During lockdown, I immediately felt I had to make my own version. I made one, posted it on Instagram, and my friends saw it and suggested we turn it into a project.
So "Mascorona" was born: we started inviting people to send photos of masks they were making at home, using whatever materials they had, and we would share them. What began as a spontaneous gesture turned into a larger curatorial effort, very active within the community in Belo Horizonte, Brazil at the time. It was a way to keep us busy and to transform the strange moment of the pandemic, when masks were suddenly everywhere, into something creative and collective. We ended up giving interviews and writing texts about it, and the project lasted exactly as long as it needed to, for the duration of the pandemic.
Moving into more abstract territory: do you think masks are also social? Something we wear all the time?
Always. I think it's almost impossible to identify a moment when we're not wearing one. As a very Gemini person, I was born with two faces already, and I've accumulated many more since. I have different personalities with different people, and that's natural. You respond to the person in front of you. You're a different self with different people, because the connection is different.
The only moment of real unmasking might be when you're alone in your room, away from any audience. Because as soon as there's someone else, there's a performance. Even just one other person creates an audience. So actually, everyone's a Gemini in the end. Everyone.
Social media seems like a very particular kind of masking.
It's the one I think about the most. Instagram is a mask I wear every day. It's a persona, not who I actually am. And what makes it different from a Carnival mask or a theatre mask is that there's no moment of removal. There's no clear ending. The Carnival happens, you inhabit it, and you take the mask off. Social media is just constant, it exists in the cloud, it's always there. There's no real version to return to.
And I think that's genuinely harmful, especially for younger people. When you're confronted with this curated, perfect mask every day and you look in the mirror, it becomes very hard to accept what you actually see. It's a very different relationship to masking – it’s not about freedom or ritual or creative transformation, but about survival. It’s about trying to fit in, or protect yourself, or avoid being seen as you really are.
You've been living in Estonia for five years now. What's your read on emotional masking in this culture?
I was waiting for this question. I've thought about it so many times. When I arrived I had one perspective. Five years in, it's different. I'm so inside it now that my view has shifted. What I noticed early on is that expressions feel saved for specific people. It's not that emotions aren't there, it's that they're reserved. The intimacy has to be earned, and for some people you might never reach it even after years. That was a cultural shock at first, and then gradually I started to understand it.
A small example: I teach sometimes, and early on there were moments when I'd be in a room with students who would just stare at me, no expression, completely unreadable. Beautiful faces, but they were giving me nothing. I started doing this thumbs up, thumbs down thing during class. Just, "guys, yes or no, did you understand?" And eventually they would crack and laugh, and I could see masks falling off. It just takes more time here. It's not that it's not there. It's a different pace.
I understand now that the climate is part of it, and I would defend this forever. People underestimate how much weather shapes social behaviour. When you physically cannot be outside because it's minus twenty degrees, you stay inside with your close people. That becomes your world. Contrast that with Brazil, where you're outside constantly, surrounded by thousands of people, and you're always performing in some way. There's always an audience. And that brings its own kind of masking too. It's just noisier.
What I actually appreciate about Estonia is that sometimes you can just walk for hours and nobody asks you anything, and you simply exist. That's a remarkable freedom. People can be quite blunt here, but there's honesty in that.
When do you think we learn which masks to wear?
From the very beginning. Parents are the first ones to hand us our masks. "Say hello to everyone." "Pretend you like the gift." "Be thankful." And you're standing there thinking you hated the gift, and you smile and say thank you. We're trained very early on to separate our inside from our outside.
And how do you unmask?
With very few people, and mostly by myself. I think you need to feel genuinely safe before you let that happen. Otherwise there's no real reason to, because everyone around you is also masked, also playing a role. Everyone is the main character of their own story, so you're just a character in theirs.
I think we also use masks as a kind of membrane, something that lets us protect the real self underneath. Sometimes you don't have the energy to deal with someone's reaction to who you actually are, so you keep the membrane up. It's a survival mechanism. It’s not always negative, but it's exhausting.
We all have masks we're tired of wearing. A happy face you've performed for so long that people think it's who you are, and then one day it's too heavy to carry, and you just can't, and people don't recognise you without it. That's the strange part. They've confused the mask for the person.
We've covered a lot of ground. What stays with you most?
Two things. One is a quote from Steinberg. He said that on the road of life, everyone wears a mask, whether real or metaphorical. People invent personas through makeup, facial expression, hairstyles. These facades become who they are. The mask as protection against revelation. And then there's a passage from Foucault's Le Corps Utopique that I really like: "To be tattooed, to wear makeup, to put on a mask, is something altogether different. It is to bring the body into communication with secret powers and invisible forces."That's the part that keeps drawing me back. Putting on a mask isn't just transformation. It's a form of contact with something invisible. That's what the Carnival entities are, in a way. That's what makes it worth taking seriously.
Credits:Art Direction, Styling & Interview by Diandra RebasePhotography by Jane TreimaMUAH by Sirel Soans