With the book Crowds and Power (Masse und Macht) by Nobel Prize-win­ner Elias Canetti as a guide, The Mass Man presents a sequel to the search for the human con­di­tion. Canetti’s mag­num opus explores the ten­sion between crowds and the indi­vid­ual. He shows how a sin­gle new and omi­nous­ly howl­ing crea­ture can arise from an appar­ent­ly het­eroge­nous group of peo­ple. In The Mass Man, Wim Catrysse trains his cam­era on a place of con­flict, Peter Verhelst writes a con­tem­po­rary text that uses Canetti’s mag­nif­i­cent book as a sound­ing board, and Zefiro Torna plays medieval music.