desire to caress and stroke with her hand what only her eyes can embrace. When that face is animated by an unknown source that leaves it hovering between extreme states of mind, somewhere between despair and exhilaration, it seems to be lit by its own energy. If each portrait is not in itself a representation of its subject but a fragment that captures the inner dynamism of a collective will, only partially realised in a visual form, then one might come close to understanding the dialectical exchange between the individual and the group. We return again to the curious sense of encounter between the ‘me’ and ‘you’ created by close-up images of individual faces magnified to a monumental scale. It is in this way that the photographic polyptych creates a parallel to Silverman’s world spectator for whom the multiplicity of the look conditions subjectivity and affirms its presence as a being in, and for, the world.

The polyptych appears in many of Masi’s installations and can be understood as a form that mediates between the modernist grid created by the lone ‘genius’ and the medieval tradition of church altars created by several artisans. It therefore oscillates between the individual and the collective. Its adherence to the grid places emphasis on seriality and repetition that strips the individual portraits of their otherwise unique and potentially transcendental associations of a metaphysical notion of the subject. It also returns the art object to its location in communal spaces like churches albeit of a different order and removes them from the private bourgeois subject associated with modernism. Yet at the same time it retains the humanist belief that underpinned its historical moment and in its photographic form acknowledges its industrialisation of communication. Here, the surface of the face, the ultimate signifier of the human presence, becomes a screen onto which the spectacle is projected not as a factual event but as a series of emotions. One might argue then, that Masi’s portraits in their grid formation convey the reciprocity of emotional ties as a circulation of glances conducted across the surface of the polyptych as a heterogeneity, a multiplicity of looks, that parallel Silverman’s notion of this spectatorship in terms of ‘the world as picture’.20

Certainly it is Masi’s intention in taking these portraits to convey social connectivity and a mutuality of affection and reciprocal exchange between members of the facchini in Viterbo and other festivals and public rituals. But what kind of mutuality is possible if the ritual is conducted in a small town in central Italy that resists the presence of outsiders? Surely the kind of regionalism that is celebrated in such festivals across Europe are based on a fear of change that can easily regress to the kind of ethnic tribalism that tore apart central Europe after the disintegration of the Soviet Union? Is this not an example of a refusal rather than an embrace of the other? One might argue that as old models of sovereignty are threatened by the upheavals of change created by globalisation, Masi’s visuality, the particular social meanings attributed to a way of seeing, is fundamentally a concern with modernity in its current state of crisis in Europe. The emphasis on standardisation, be it nationalist, European or global, only serves to accentuate internal divisions in a country like Italy that has always been a collection of cultural, agricultural and trade centres rather than a single entity. John Berger has suggested that such instances of European regionalism offer the most fruitful model for an alternative social and structural organisation in which

20 Silverman takes the phrase from Heidegger’s The Age of the World Picture but removes it from the Cartesian subject in whom the notion of looking is a form of possession. Instead by aligning it with her own reading of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, she presents it as a form of showing: World Spectators, op. cit., pp. 93-95. This kind of ‘showing’ seems evident in Masi’s use of the polyptych.