Published Thursday, April 8, 2021 at 5:34 p.m.
Under the waves of Lausanne Cathedral invites a succession of pilgrimage panels. Are the Easter holidays behind us? This procession travels elsewhere: from Paris to Kabul and from Kabul to Paris. This is the way of the Lausanne writer Pierre Conne, accompanied by his typographer friend Ernest Imhof, in 1970 … in 2 CV. A 17,000 km raid organized by Citroën for around 1,000 participants, including Pierre Conne, who at the time produced a literary history and a series of photos. Nearly fifty years later, discovered by his daughter Julie Henoch, who also occasionally contributes to Le Temps, this log takes us on the trail of young adventures.
“The story of this raid has permeated our family mythology, even though I was born much later,” Julie Henoch said. My father died in 2008 and while I was looking in the library last spring, I found him. And I said to myself: this is really not bad! “
“Fake hippies”
Organized as part of the Festival Histoire et Ville, dedicated this year to the theme of travel, the Fair Route exhibition does not stop at exploiting the beautiful photographs of Pierre Conne, between dry surfaces and the faces of children wiped by the Afghan sun. . Four researchers from the University of Lausanne (from the literary geographer to the anthropologist of religions) have looked into these memories to weave politico-philosophical reflections: the role of the travelogue, the ideals of youth after 1968 but also the fine line between research elsewhere in neocolonialism…
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Sylvain Venayre: “The tourist trip has no virtue in itself”
“True bourgeois, false hippies”, in the words of Pierre Conne himself, these pilgrim tourists were fleeing the Western way of life… but are they really getting rid of it? Through a visual and healthy journey, it is the orientalist clichés and the contradictions of the time that call into question fairness – but also our own relationship to travel.
In the tensions of the cathedral, we follow in the footsteps of the two explorers between wonder, engine roar and canned ravioli. With, implicitly, the homage of a daughter to her father. “Opening up our family history helped create entry points, making these analyzes accessible to everyone,” said Julie Henoch. An intimate and universal journey.