Mask - vuvi - Gabon (No reserve price)

Decorative Vouvi mask from Gabon. Tsogho people. Mounted on a pedestal.


The Tsogho country, though geographically preserved in its inhospitable mountains, lies at the crossroads of distinctly differentiated stylistic currents.

The Tsogho culture thus lies at the point where influences and beliefs converge, which it appears to have sought to synthesize through a religious and mystical vocation.

Used during the nocturnal ceremonies of the Bwété initiatic society, these masks are ritual objects, kept out of sight of non-initiates.
They intervene as supernatural manifestations, materializing the multitude of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic entities that the esoteric teaching dispensed by the brotherhood uses as symbols.
The mask thus serves to visualize the multicolored and proliferating pantheon of symbolic images that initiatory narratives evoke.

For the Mitsogho people and within the Bwété society, the mask serves a dual function.
Sacred object reserved for the initiated at night, the same mask appears by day in the eyes of everyone, thus assuming an ambiguous role:
In this case, it still arouses fear, but also becomes a pretext for a game.

We can also observe, during the daytime festivities that follow the Bwété ceremonies, genuine staged scenes in which unmasked figures appear, but dressed up or garbed in grotesque costumes—like buffoons portraying anecdotal characters—in the course of bawdy or satirical scenes in which the history of the tribe and its clashes with neighboring tribes are invoked.