2025, Le Nouveau Printemps’ third year already!

Now an annual fixture of spring in Toulouse, the Festival keeps on keeping on, faithful to the values and beliefs that have driven it since its reinvention: being an echo of the present, and of the great transformations and transitions of our times; uncovering and encouraging today’s artists and creators by supporting their new productions; bringing together a neighborhood in the city and radiating out to highlight its inhabitants, specificities, places and venues, private and public, open and shut, celebrated and unheralded; always progressing toward a more sustainable, inclusive and accountable process; and, eager to share artists’ takes on our times, entrusting the conception of each edition to a partner-artist from one of the multiple fields of creation.

Kiddy Smile brought all his enthusiasm and seriousness to the curation of the next edition. Musician, DJ, voguer, performer, judge on Drag Race France, and fashion icon, Kiddy Smile is himself a multifaceted and unifying creator. It is that diversity in all its forms, as much as his propensity to bring together and create a family out of a community of artists, that guided him on his mission. He has transcribed a story in upper and lowercase in the Saint-Sernin and Arnaud Bernard neighborhood that is as personal as it is universal. The 2025 Festival brings together 39 guest artists, including 10 young graduates of IsdaT, 14 new creations, 10 venues, 4 projects in public spaces, and partnerships with 4 universities or places of higher education: Jean Jaurès and Capitole universities, ENSAV public film school and, of course, the Institut Supérieur des arts et du design de Toulouse (isdaT), as well as numerous local and national collaborations and coproductions.

Thanks to everybody who believes in creation as an essential catalyst to understanding and being in the world today and becoming a society. Thanks to our partners, both institutional and private; thanks also to our host venues as well as teachers and students involved in the various participative projects; thanks to all the artists, curators and co-programmers invited to contribute to this collective adventure; thanks to Kiddy Smile for his trust and commitment over the last year alongside the Festival’s team; thanks to the board of directors that has loyally supported me; and thanks to Clément Postec, Anaelle Bourguignon and Lucie Champagnac for their unstinting commitment to making the Festival a great success.

Coming up, one wonderful Festival!

Eugénie Lefebvre
Président, Le Nouveau Printemps

Kiddy Smile: a celebration of inspirations

Multidimensional artist and key player on the electro and ballroom scenes, Kiddy Smile is an insatiable explorer.

Impassioned and convinced that style grows out of perpetual learning and boundless curiosity, for this year’s Le Nouveau Printemps, Kiddy Smile is the Guest Curator!

Kiddy Smile’s music has its roots in Chicago house music, which emerged from the struggles of Black and queer1 communities. His creative journey bears the deep mark of those movements, combining social justice and artistic creativity. At age 20, after discovering downtown Paris and himself in that city of love and free-thinking, Kiddy Smile gave up the suburbs and his studies, and left for Los Angeles. Penniless, he was hired as a cleaner in a youth hostel. He veered onto another path when he discovered waacking, a street dance style developed in the 1970s. Kiddy Smile is attracted to and accepted into that world of movement where discriminations are reversed, and that celebrates the joy and right to be multiple iterations of oneself. Back in France, the artist recorded his first tracks and refined his method: independence of mind and creation, and a rock solid commitment to his people, first and foremost the voguing2 community, which continues to this day. Kiddy Smile’s practice began, therefore, with dance and music, vibrant in their search for a style and demanding sufficient self-esteem to build real relationships.

Le Nouveau Printemps 2025 by Kiddy Smile: a constellation of connections to speak of love and families Le Nouveau Printemps 2025 is a homage to Kiddy Smile, and from Kiddy Smile to families everywhere that come from the heart.

Along with Kiddy Smile, Le Nouveau Printemps has invited a dozen artists to produce artworks and insights, including those of curator Yandé Diouf and programmer Amélie Galli. Photographs, sculptures, performances and films make up an eclectic itinerary of poetic offerings that embody a situated and empathic program for art. In the spirit of feminist struggles of the 1970s, theorized in particular with the philosopher Donna Haraway or through the thinking of Care. Caring also means knowing and saying where I speak from, a vision that expanded with the American Afrofeminist academic Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in the late 1980s and the intersectional3 question: what impact do multiple, simultaneous discriminations have on the individual, within groups or in society?

Kiddy Smile and his guests update those perspectives

Each offering is presented on the streets of the Saint-Sernin Arnaud Bernard neighborhood or in partner-venues. Each in its own way extends a story of representations and bodies fighting. Shapes, sounds, images and words are proposed as so many possible answers to the great enigma of hate.

This year’s Le Nouveau Printemps takes place in a neighborhood that possesses a rich heritage in the sacred, material and the living. Between the Saint-Sernin Basilica, the heritage library, the Archaeology Museum and the memories of migration in Arnaud Bernard, the realities of a metropolis in transition offer the Festival the opportunity to drop anchor in a territory where period, stories and communities are in constant dialogue.

A prolific artist, Kiddy Smile defines himself less by iconoclastic posturing than by an imperious need to redefine stories, adjust their rules and broaden their possibilities. With the guests he has invited to participate in Le Nouveau Printemps, an artwork once more becomes a process of reparation, a salutary experience in which each individual can find a space to feel, reflect, meet, dream and think. The artists converge around inclusivity as a process. Bonds are formed to renew broken trajectories—distant countries, shattered families, erased beings or undermined emotions. The works contain within themselves an urgency to reinvent a loving culture. Love not as an abstraction, but as a practice capable of joining us together and perhaps changing the future. The presented works embody that quest to connect the personal and the collective, to heal hurting with joy, to save gravity through grace, deficiencies through demands, and silences through images. They propel us into the springs that Kiddy Smile likes to cite in the plural as so many new ways of getting along together, here and now.

Since my different identities are simultaneously not consecutively embodied they are so many sources of inspiration and motivation to challenge the established order. They drive my desire and need to roll back the boundaries of constrictive realities. In this sense, it seems vital to me today to reclaim spaces conducive to giving and redistributing platforms to those who have rarely been heard.

If I cannot see myself, I cannot imagine myself, and if I cannot imagine myself, I cannot fulfill myself. I do not exist, therefore, in the present, or in the past, and even less so in the future. That is why the representation of the diversity of beings and their bodies is so important.

I am honored and delighted to participate in the adventure that is Le Nouveau Printemps, and to put together an unprecedented, inclusive, generous and surprising edition for 2025 brimming with kindliness! As an intersectional, multidisciplinary artist, I am passionate about opening doors for anyone who relates to my message and my way of expressing myself artistically.

Through music, video, dance and fashion, I explore the dichotomy between my Blackness, sexual identity and gender, and my social origins.Looking for my place in society, the question I ask myself, which is the thread running through my artistic practice, is, “What does it mean to be French?”

The different media that I explore allow me to approach this question from various angles and amplify what I have to say thanks to the reactions that my presence provokes in spaces where racial, social and gender diversity is not the rule.