Studia Filologiczne UJK

Summary

The outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus pandemic caused an almost explosion in mask creation/production, not only in Poland but worldwide, which prompted the authors to subject the pandemic masks to analysis. The exploration of websites allowed to identify 300 different types of masks. The discussion focuses on two important and at the same time closely related categories: the mask and the face. The paper seeks to answer the following questions: (1) How has the pandemic changed the perception of the face; (2) What functions does the current pandemic mask fulfill in the context of the functions previously attributed to traditional, ritual masks? As it turned out, the analyzed masks, besides the basic protective function, fulfill a number of other functions, such as: prestige, aesthetic, identification, expressive, impressionistic, ludic, didactic/educational and protest. All these allowed the authors to conclude that the mask is not only an object/artifact, but also a human being, as well as a kind of visual document that characterizes the subject wearing it. The method used in this research is content analysis.