At the Center for the History of the Resistance and Deportation (CHRD) in Lyon, the first room of the “Faces” exhibition opens with a disturbing installation, apparently more artistic than historical. Gas masks, placed on rods, fix the visitor with their glassy gaze. In 1939, the French government, fearing the use of chemical weapons in the event of a German invasion, pushed the population to equip themselves with this equipment.
At a time when masks are returning to the daily life of a world in health crisis, the wink is not trivial. Yesterday gas masks, today surgical masks: in each troubled era, faces are affected. “We see the irruption of a warlike vocabulary once morest the virus that is attacking us, the faces are once once more hidden, explains Marion Vivier, curator of the exhibition. On the occasion of the centre’s thirty years of existence, we are offering a poetic wandering to meet the faces of our collection. »
Drawings, paintings, photos, posters, the CHRD de Lyon has drawn on its collections to tell the story through the faces, in a very subtle scenography. The central room of the exhibition presents fifty-four portraits, full frame. These are prisoners of war, drawn in gouache by Jean Billon, in 1940, in Stalag VIII C in Silesia, Poland. Leaving the camp in 1942, the portraits of the painter from Lyon served as propaganda for the Vichy regime to reassure regarding the fate of the 7,500 French people deported to Poland. They were donated to the museum in 2002 by the artist’s family. In 2022, these faces express something completely different. Suspended by invisible threads, above a mirror, on the ground, they give the impression of souls returning from the limbo of the past, expressing to the visitor all the distress or the anger of the captives. They also provide information on their conditions, their origins and their common fate in Europe at war.
“Culture of War”
The CHRD was opened in 1992, at the instigation of Mayor Michel Noir, in a wing of a highly symbolic building. The site of the avenue Berthelot, in the 7e arrondissement of Lyon, was a military health school in the 19the century, then headquarters of the Gestapo commanded by Klaus Barbie, between 1942 and 1944. The “Faces” exhibition unfolds in a gallery of underground rooms that served as cells for Nazi torturers.
In the soft light of the vaulted rooms, the crowd of faces is gradually revealed, populating the memory of the place. Gypsies from the Saliers camp (Bouches-du-Rhône), in the Camargue, Jewish families deported, arrested resistance fighters, the eyes of the absent meet those of contemporary witnesses, photographed by Frédéric Bellay for the CHRD.
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