Three Fribourg Photographers Revisit the Industrial Past of Their City
Three Fribourg-based photographers turn to their own archives to honor the city’s vanished industrial sites. Their exhibition gathers decades of work, offering a visual map of the places that once powered Fribourg and helped shape its urban footprint. The project blends documentary rigor with a quiet reverence for a world that has largely disappeared beneath urban redevelopment.
A triad of sites, a shared memory
At the center of the show are emblematic sites that once stood as symbols of Fribourg’s industrial era: the Cardinal brewery, the Ritter Hall complex, and the Boxal aluminium packaging factory. Each photograph captures not only the machines and architecture but also the human presence that gave these places meaning. The artists returned to these sites both physically and in memory, tracing the moments when production slowed, then stopped, and the landscape began to change shape around it.
From aging structures to fading traces of human life
In a city-wide narrative of urban transformation, the photographers emphasize what remains of the human story in these spaces. As one photographer notes in the accompanying interview, “There is still the smell of the factory that lingers. The worker is still there,” underscoring how memory persists in smell, light, and the arrangement of once-bustling spaces.
The Cardinal brewery, for instance, confronted its first closure threat in 1996. The photographers revisited the site in 2010 when production had dwindled to roughly twenty workers from a former workforce of around four hundred. These contrasts—between vitality and quiet, between noise and silence—are etched into the frames, inviting viewers to sense the atmosphere that defined another era of Fribourg’s economy.
Marks of humanity on industrial architecture
Beyond the machines, the project seeks “the trace of the elements that humans left in these architectures.” The photographers describe moments that feel almost cinematic in their emotional charge yet are anchored in everyday reality. The aim is to show how human presence imprints itself on spaces designed for manufacture: benches, stairwells, faded signs, and the careful choreography of light on metal and brick. Each photograph becomes a small history lesson, a reminder of the people who once moved through these spaces and the work that shaped their daily lives.
Memory amid redevelopment: preserving a city’s industrial soul
Today, several former sites have been demolished to make way for new infrastructure, while others have been repurposed. The Ritter Hall, for example, has been transformed into the Haute École d’ingénierie et d’architecture de Fribourg, a visible sign of how urban needs shift while memories endure in the photographic record. The exhibition thus fills a gap in the collective memory, offering visitors a guided tour through the city’s industrial arc and inviting reflection on what is lost when a city evolves.
A personal project with public resonance
Organized as a tribute to a vanishing industrial landscape, the project is both a personal exploration and a public service. By placing archival images in dialogue with the present, the photographers encourage a dialogue between generations: those who lived through Fribourg’s industrial heyday and younger residents who may only know these sites through memory or metaphor. The show becomes a time capsule and a reminder that cities are built not only of bricks and machines but also of memories held by workers, families, and communities.
Reportage by Carine Regidor; web adaptation by Sébastien Foggiato.
