Welcome to the second edition of Le Nouveau Printemps.

In 2023, we opened up a new era for the festival, underpinned by a certain number of commitments:

• Achieving resonance with the major issues, transformations and transitions of our times;
• Accompanying emerging and established artists on projects exploring human, social, ecological and territorial issues through a majority of new creations;
• Becoming an annual event for art lovers and neophytes in Toulouse, the surrounding region, France and Europe;
• Imagining a festival capable of reaching out from a single territory into neighborhoods of cities and lives, through open, festive and, in some cases, participatory projects. And a festival that is as ecological, responsible and inclusive as possible, bringing special attention and innovation to ever more sustainable ways of doing.

Starting out from those commitments, we wanted to create a festival capable of reinventing itself each year by inviting a partner-artist involved in a broad swathe of contemporary creative endeavor (design, cinema, literature, music, fashion...) to take a unique look at a particular neighborhood in Toulouse, make acquaintance with its spaces and inhabitants, and infiltrate its nooks and crannies.

We chose to entrust this second edition of Le Nouveau Printemps to author and filmmaker Alain Guiraudie, and to invite him to unleash his world and his imagination on a historical part of the city center, the Carmes–St. Etienne neighborhood. In its second year, we are starting to define the contours of a shapeshifting festival that, by being open to multiple points of view on art and the world, transforms itself each year without ever losing its core.  While the first edition, curated by designer matali crasset, reflected on the living world and communities, this edition, with Alain Guiraudie at the helm, plunges us into the offbeat and unsettling uncertainties of fantasy futures. If the two artists develop markedly different aesthetic worlds, they share a taste for the detour, and an acute sense of the bonds with territories.

An extraordinary storyteller with a gift for unexpected conjunctions and unlikely encounters,  Alain Guiraudie brings together two dozen contemporary artists with completely different backstories and backgrounds. Exhibitions, installations in public spaces, participatory projects, screenings and parties... As in his movies, it is all about finding beauty and poetry in places where they are least expected.

Eugénie Lefebvre
Chair, Le Nouveau Printemps

 

Le Nouveau Printemps by Alain Guiraudie

An extraordinary storyteller, Alain Guiraudie possesses a talent for unlikely encounters, a predilection for the path less traveled, and an acute sense of connections with the world around us. He brings together two dozen contemporary artists who plunge us into the offbeat and unsettling uncertainties of fantasy futures. Exhibitions, participative projects, installations in public spaces, performances, and more. As in his movies, everything is about finding beauty and poetry in  places where they are least expected. 

Edito

The contemporary world is at once certain and uncertain. We're all pretty sure we are headed for disaster, but we all want to believe it will turn out okay. In its headlong rush forward, does today's world still hold promise? Or are we living our final hours? We imagine that, at every period in time, humans envisioned the future torn between promise and apprehension; we always more or less envisioned our future torn between utopia and dystopia, heaven and hell, horror and happiness. And, who knows, one day in the future, the worst urban horrors may well be admired by our descendants. Perhaps they'll say, "Back in the day, they knew how to make beautiful stuff."

I aim to focus the 2024 edition of Le Nouveau Printemps on these dialectics. After the simple representation of the world, one of the oldest issues in art has been to combine the ideal and real, the mythical and prosaic, dream and reality, and even to make them collide. And beyond that, it's also a major issue to seek out beauty where it isn't and create objects of desire where nobody would have believed. Art, or at least art that interests me, attempts to challenge prevailing codes, reinvent the idea of beauty, or blur the boundaries between beautiful and ugly. 

So far, I have invited primarily young artists, most of whom look to the future, using new technologies, playing with them, combining humdrum or more noble materials and objects in their installations, in order to bring them together in an aesthetic project. Some of them are positioned at the frontiers of art, drawing on both science and spirituality in their creations. I also have in mind artists who explore faded utopias, worlds that held promise in their day but fell into ruin, or idyllic universes inspiring their share of apprehension.

Alain Guiraudie
Partner-artist