Souvenir d’Alsace

“Souvenir d’Alsace” explores the inner workings of an iconography built, over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and three successive wars, on the close interweaving of picturesque representation and national propaganda.

Charles Fréger draws on historical references borrowed from imagery, illustration, press drawings, manufactured objects and works of historical commemoration. Alsace thus becomes a field for experimentation with these objects of vernacular culture and the mechanisms by which these representations are disseminated.

Carried out over several years, the project involves the participation of local French and German players, intervening at different stages of the creative process. Like the iconography studied and its economy of distribution, which in the industrial age deployed a wide range of media, Charles Fréger’s project brings together various forms of local manufacture, art and craft (ceramics, wooden masks, embroidery, etc.).

The artist’s aesthetic of silhouettes, shadow plays and stage sets is combined with a contemporary reinterpretation of traditional objects. In the long term, this important corpus will offer a panorama of Alsatian visual archetypes, and open the way for reflection on the political forms linked to this iconography, the imaginary world it has forged and the mythology it has served. In a semi-darkness, from which we don’t know whether it emerges or withdraws, the icon inhabits a greyed-out frontier space, where the obviousness it usually displays is not the order of the day.