Wilder Mann

Finished

Practical information

Place

Place de Sardaigne 2
1227 Carouge
Switzerland

Prices

Free Admission

Saturday, May 6, 6pm, exhibition opening followed by a free concert by Oana Dinea
From May 7 to 28, from 8am to 8pm
Closing time of the park: 10pm - 7am

For two years, from 2010 to 2011, Charles Fréger (1975) travelled across Europe, from north to south, from Finland to Portugal, passing through Romania, Germany and Slovenia, in search of the figure of the savage as it survives in local popular traditions.
These archetypal images of a half-human, half-beast, animal or plant creature resurface from the depths of time on the occasion of pagan or religious rituals celebrating the cycle of the seasons, fat days, carnivals or Easter eve.
In the common fund of the European rural societies, these characters or these emblematic animals represented protective figures or symbols of fertility. Today, they evoke an imaginary, impulsive and physical world where everyone perceives an ancestral relationship with nature, where the springs of our animality and sometimes the regressive desire inherent in some of our behaviors emerge. Charles Fréger speaks of "a zoomorphic figure whose rudimentary aspect and ritualistic dress refer to a universal nudity". The outfit, however, does not allow any glimpse of skin, the human figure is completely buried under an avalanche of heavy furs, wools, bells, horns and other materials and accessories. Here again, photographing outside the periods of festivals or carnivals, the artist stages these characters in a natural environment that he often chooses to be wide and open. There is also this other freedom taken with regard to the silhouettes themselves: he does not hesitate to omit some voluntarily and to photograph others from behind, claiming there the partiality of his inventory, more poetic than scientific.

At the beginning of 2013, less than two years after his tour of Europe, Charles Fréger left for Japan to discover the namahage, a ritual that brings sermons for children as well as wishes for good health and soil fertility. The demons of namahage were to be the Japanese counterparts of the Austrian Krampus portrayed in Wilder Mann, and gave rise to a new photographic campaign, Yokainoshima, completed in 2015, in which the artist traces a veritable cartography of the masquerades that punctuate the lives of the inhabitants of rural Japan. At the same time, in 2014, his encounter in Louisiana with the Mardi Gras Indians put him on the trail of what will be the third part of this work dedicated to masquerades: Cimarron, which is anchored this time in the territories of the Americas. In a geographical space stretching from the southern United States to Brazil and including sixteen countries, Charles Fréger draws up a non-exhaustive inventory of masquerades practiced mainly by the descendants of African slaves celebrating the memory of their peers and their singular cultures.

These three sets, if they were all marked by the publication of a book of photographs compiling the local traditions and explaining them, are not yet closed. Thus, thanks to new discoveries, the photographer occasionally adds an additional figure to his collection Wilder Mann, spotted in Ireland, England, Alsace... or, very recently, in Sweden.

From one continent to another, from one country to another, the cultural histories of the regions explored emerge, of which the masquerades constitute the theatrical echo.