Revista de antropologie urbană nr. 21

Physiognomy in motion. Cultural traits & professional changes.

The human face is like a personal museum that also belongs to the city it inhabits. The way we look in childhood and adulthood reflects, beyond ontogeny and other cultural determinations, the space we inhabit; in other words, our personal “museum” rearranges its “exhibits” according to “visitors” (history and ideologies), but also to the constant activity of “redecoration” (changes in the urban space around us). There are communicating vessels between generations, made out of soul traits and, implicitly of physiognomy, specific to certain professions with a wider field of manifestation: soldiers, merchants-investors, doctors, lawyers, pedagogues. In old age, the entire human expression, and especially the visage, expresses each of us, it says something about us, about our biography. I started this site between 2011-2012, during an anthropology research internship at the University of Vienna, coordinated by Prof. Kahl Thede. My work was focused on the museum heritage anthropological value, particularly of the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna, on which occasion I began to note a series of similarities between human faces portrayed several centuries apart. There is a hidden detail of common physiognomy within the professions developed in urban Europe. In the end, each and everyone of us is a museum bearing, on the one hand, today’s expression -which is different from yesterday’s or tomorrow’s expressions, or even that which we assume in an hour- and on the other hand, everything we have stored in memory: moments, events, people we met along the years, etc. (all selected according to a criteria above our understanding), which we are pleased to meet again, to evoke and relive, or to hide well, keeping them nonetheless, for reasons difficult to explain. I want to say that a face, the whole appearance memorizes, over time, more or less discreetly, some features, according to the criteria of a sculptor, of an artist who aims to express something through creation. Because some signs, traces of events, circumstances, are traces of our own history that must not be lost. Somehow we reach senescence wearing a kind of mask that is not really a mask, because it doesn’t hide but expresses us, it is like an essential piece from a personal museum. This mechanism of preserving traces of something that was and no longer is, but deserves to be kept and which I call a personal museum, seems to be a natural process…