Rostros

In September 1968, John Cassavetes premiered his film Faces at the Venice Film Festival. Just a few days earlier, on 31 August, Pablo Picasso began a series of twenty-one engravings entitled Raphael and the Fornarina observed by the Pope at his mansion in Notre-Dame-da-Vie. The umbilical cord linking these and other collections of disparities narrated here could perhaps be the face. Everything happens in the face, everything is the face. Any biography is also an archaeology of the face, any sociological diagnosis is a facial reconstruction, any artistic intervention is an exercise in anaplastology, any policy is a choreography of expressions, any economy is an archive of wear and tear and wrinkles. Ideological lifting, religious botox, creative stretching, urban depigmentations, territorial peelings… Today, more than ever, it seems that reality has been transformed into a tiny section of cosmetics. This book is both a story and an essay. Or a collection of stories that not only “refer to what happened”, but also “develop ideas”. And they do so on the basis of hundreds of characters: for some readers these will just be names and more names; but others will immediately recognise the protagonists of this era of stupor, where (almost) everyone wants to be someone else or, at the very least, to be different.