November 14, 2015. The show dedicated to press cartoons News papersat Poinçonnet (Indre), is preparing to welcome visitors. The day before, terrorists carried out attacks in the heart of Paris, killing 130 people. Ten months earlier, other terrorists had decimated the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo, killing eight journalists, editorialists and cartoonists. “The organizers asked themselves the question of maintaining, remembers Mathilde Fouchet, culture assistant at Poinçonnet. But unanimously, they decided that it had to be done“.
That year, among the designers invited to present their work, Ali Shamra. This Syrian refugee fled his country at the end of 2014 after seeing one of his colleagues and friends.tortured then murdered for having caricatured Bashar al Assad“. Installed in Limoges, Ali is very shocked: “I was very scared. I told myself that I had never heard that in France, there could be a problem with a drawing. And then I reacted: here as in Syria, there is the same fight for press freedom“. Since then, Ali Shamra has tried to practice in France but is struggling to find his place: “Editors-in-chief are sometimes cautious. They hesitate to publish press cartoons”
Also present, the designer Placide becomes aware of the urgency to educate: “There is work to be done in schools. The drawing uses figures of speech, common references. To understand it, you need to have a whole bunch of cultural references“.
Media education in schools
This media education is one of the missions of the Papiers d’actu show. “We go to schools in Indre, from kindergarten to CFA, to raise awareness of freedom of expression, tolerance and respect. It’s quite an education. Some were too young in 2015 to understand what happened. We must give them the keys to understanding press cartoons and show them that we can laugh at everything“
For this 2025 editionMathilde Fouchet ensures that a tribute will be paid to Charlie’s victims. “There will be a tribute exhibition relating to the cartoonists killed that day. I don’t know yet in what way but it will be an edition marked by the ten years of this attack“.
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