Masks, balaclavas, eye masks, and various accessories have been consistently used to hide the face, from Greek times through the grotesque of the Middle Ages to the Latin American theatre festivals of the 1980s. In the twenty-first century, technological advances such as facial recognition, which are being used for the biopolitical control of the face, caused activists to start developing different mechanisms to cover their faces in public spaces. In other words, the mask is not used solely as a device that builds unique aesthetic-political senses but is also used to avoid being captured by surveillance cameras. The aim of this paper is to identify some of the masks used by activists in Latin American public protests, generating new signs that circulate widely in the semiosphere such as physiognomy, representation, and evocation. For this, we will return to Juri Lotman’s proposal on the semiosphere and the notion of facesphere developed by José Finol, concepts that operate as epistemological and heuristic frameworks that allow understanding the concrete meaning production processes as a global dimension and not only a particular one. What faces are hidden and what physiognomies are shown in the social protest? What borders are established? What political and aesthetic meanings do they build? These are the questions that this paper attempts to answer from a perspective of cultural semiotics.

中文翻译：

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拉丁美洲社会抗议活动中的激进分子蒙面

从希腊时代到怪诞的中世纪，再到 20 世纪 80 年代的拉丁美洲戏剧节，面具、巴拉克拉法帽、眼罩和各种配饰一直被用来隐藏脸部。在二十一世纪，面部识别等技术进步被用于对面部进行生物政治控制，促使活动人士开始开发不同的机制来在公共场所遮盖自己的面部。换句话说，面具不仅仅被用作构建独特的审美政治感的装置，而且还被用来避免被监控摄像头捕捉到。本文的目的是识别活动人士在拉丁美洲公共抗议中使用的一些面具，从而产生在符号圈中广泛传播的新符号，例如面相、表征和唤起。为此，我们将回到尤里·洛特曼（Juri Lotman）关于符号圈的提议和何塞·菲诺尔（José Finol）提出的面圈概念，这些概念作为认识论和启发式框架运作，允许将具体的意义产生过程理解为全球维度而不仅仅是特定维度。社会抗议中隐藏了哪些面孔、展现了哪些面貌？设立了什么边界？它们构建了什么样的政治和美学意义？这些都是本文试图从文化符号学角度回答的问题。