Le Printemps de Septembre à Toulouse, Le Printemps de la Photographie, Le Printemps de Cahors... The festival founded by Mathé Perrin in 1991 has had multiple names and lives while always maintaining the desire to support artists, encourage audacious creativity and promote encounters between artworks and mainstream audiences in order to act as an echo chamber for the great questions of the day. 

Today, when environmental issues, the position of artists in our projects for society, and the role of art as a vector of cohesion and agency are core concerns, at the instigation of its new president Eugénie Lefebvre and director Anne-Laure Belloc, the festival will become Le Nouveau Printemps. 

A festival curated each year with a partner-artist 

In the conviction that artists’ visions are key to a more sensitive understanding of what is on the line in a globalized world of dizzying complexity, Le Nouveau Printemps will invite, in June each year, an artist from a discipline linked to the visual arts (architecture, film, music, literature, dance, etc) to co-curate its program. Irreverent, minimalist or exuberant, poetical or political, with each edition, the festival will reinvent itself. Guided by the partner-artist, Le Nouveau Printemps will showcase a distinct universe to reveal, year by year, multiple visions of art. 

A sustainable festival rooted in an urban landscape 

The partner-artist will be invited to bring their unique gaze to bear on the city, show their curiosity toward its spaces and inhabitants, shake up routines, and slip between cracks. Like a laboratory on a human scale – featuring a different neighborhood each year – Le Nouveau Printemps will combine the ephemeral, the essence of a festival, and the sustainable, which is essential and necessary. 

For its first edition, Le Nouveau Printemps has chosen to partner with matali crasset, a multidisciplinary creator with a longstanding commitment to ecological transition. She brings an approach that is at the intersection of artistic and anthropological practices, as upbeat as it is political, and intended to add a common touch and open up possibilities. 

The last edition of the festival co-curated with matali crasset has rolled out in Toulouse from June 2-July 2, 2023 in Saint-Cyprien neighborhood.  

For its return, Le Nouveau Printemps invites the author and filmmaker Alain Guiraudie to devise the next edition.

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. 

The festival will blow during one month, from May 30 to June 30, in museums and public squares, stores and parks of the Carmes – Saint-Etienne district, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Toulouse.