When Swiss traditional customs offer up a mirror to the ridiculous
Invited to photograph Switzerland’s traditional winter rites, French photographer Charles Fréger has produced images that reflect old customs while posing questions about the present-day.
The thin layer of snow covering the ground in Teufen, eastern Switzerland, is slowly melting. It’s in winter, and specifically on the last night of the year, that this small Appenzeller town comes alive with archaic figures known as Silvesterchläuse. Dressed in fir branches or straw, some of them wearing demonic masks, these New Year figures move in groups from house to house and sing a peculiar, polyphonic “yodel” of resonant vowels and syllables.
But that’s not all. Teufen is also known for traditions native to Romania. For a project he calls Charivari, renowned French photographer Charles Fréger captured images in Switzerland of carnivals and other traditional rituals designed to drive away the winter and evil spirits. These photographs, which can now be seen alongside images taken elsewhere in Europe, are now on show at Teufen’s Zeughaus museum.
Charivari stands for cacophony and chaos, a term with origins in the Greek word karebaria for headache, akin to the German word Krawall, or riot. Fréger is interested in rites that create a state of collective disorder.
One photograph in the exhibition illustrates this: a group of men are strapped into a ladder which they carry crossways, the reversal of the rungs representing the reversal of the usual hierarchies.
Such customs enable “a kind of reset for the community”, says Fréger. However, he no longer sees festivals such as carnival as the place where everything is turned topsy-turvy – this now takes place elsewhere.
“Today, the cathartic function of masquerade has moved to social media, where people use avatars or pseudonyms,” he says. “Like masks, these give people freedoms from the rest of the world.”
Fréger is interested in the rituals he photographs as moments of connection between people. He prefers to take his pictures in villages, where small, close-knit groups of masked individuals come together.
His approach to these old customs is that of a collector, an approach that has been compared to that of the late German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher, who documented industrial buildings with radical objectivity. But instead of rigs and silos, the Frenchman started photographing uniforms, and later kept coming back to costumes.
Fréger sees his Charivari series as a continuation of another one of his projects, Wild Man. In it he documents the figure of an animalistic man who resurfaces in various forms around the world: the Tschäggättä in the Swiss canton of Valais, the Percht in Austria, or Scotland’s Burryman. These “wild” creatures, dressed in natural materials, in some cases including frightening masks, lie somewhere between devils, bears, and even bawdy goats, as seen in Romania.
Caricaturing others and oneself
On his travels through Europe, Fréger repeatedly encountered caricatured representations of marginalised communities such as Roma, Jews and Black people. His position is not one of clear condemnation. For instance, he is interested in the figure of Zwarte Piet, or Black Peter. This traditional figure, who accompanies St. Nicholas in The Netherlands, has long been considered racist because of its derisory portrayal of Black people that normalises blackface.
In Charivari, Fréger depicts figures that he had previously “tended to avoid”, including figures that can provoke conflict. Some of the encounters that Fréger documents in Charivari appear brutal. One example is in the Swiss village of Herisau, where a funeral is staged every year for the fictional child Gidio Hosestoss, who chokes to death on a stolen biscuit. His parents, wearing grotesque masks, follow the funeral procession weeping, and the priest delivers a scornful sermon. “It seems extremely cruel. But I see it as an image to ward off evil, as if to protect against death,” says Fréger.
“I don’t have a firm opinion on this issue,” says the photographer. “But I am interested in how certain masquerades have been politically devalued. How could something that even in the 2000s represented the wonderful and childlike become a monstrous figure in just a few short years?”
The exhibition in Teufen shows several Malanka masquerades, which are celebrated in Ukraine, Romania and the Republic of Moldova on the night of January 13-14, New Year’s Eve according to the Orthodox Julian calendar. Entire village populations don costumes embodying a wide range of symbolic characters: the priest, the devil, or figures reminiscent of fallen powers, such as the Arnaut, modelled on the Albanian mercenaries of the Ottoman Empire. There are also masks representing Roma stereotypes.
The characters in Charivari are often caricatures of the foreign, the other, and the outsider. “There are many figures in European masquerades that reflect power dynamics. It’s about confrontations between communities, and memories of invasions and wars,” says Fréger.
The photographer says it’s important to give space to these debates: “We need to revive or protect our ability to caricature in Europe – to satirise and mock in a world where we can no longer poke fun at things.”
Charivari is also a central concept in Basel’s carnival. During his tour of Switzerland, Fréger felt most at home at the Swiss city’s Schnitzelbänken, musical rhyming recitals that mock everything and anything. “I really liked the jester-like aspect of it,” he says. “I immediately felt connected with the people.”
Another central aspect for Fréger is that “satire only works if you are willing to make yourself look ridiculous”.
He was therefore particularly fascinated by Switzerland’s Nünichlingler: men in long black coats, with bells around their necks and very tall top hats. Every year at 9pm on Christmas Eve, they walk, ghost-like, through the village of Ziefen in the Basel region. Originally, these figures were meant to scare children, rewarding the well-behaved and punishing the disobedient. Since the 20th century, discipline and silence have characterised the custom – along with a competition for the tallest hat.
“There is something megalomaniacal about these hats,” says the photographer. “At some point, they had to stop making the hats taller, because they couldn’t fit under the power lines anymore.”
For Fréger, the common thread in his Charivari exhibition is that people expose themselves to ridicule: the mayor runs through the streets dressed as a pig, a politician sits on a donkey, and people create grotesque bodies for themselves.
“Charivari isn’t just about the freedom to drink too much, eat too much and do whatever you want. It’s also an opportunity to look in the mirror and see how ridiculous you are,” he says. “I think that’s what we’re missing right now.”
Edited by Mark Livingston and Benjamin von Wyl. Adapted from German by Katherine Price/gw.
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