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, the festival has 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 in 2023, in Saint-Cyprien neighborhood, Le Nouveau Printemps has chosen to partner with matali crasset, a multidisciplinary creator with a longstanding commitment to ecological transition.  

In 2024, Le Nouveau Printemps has invited the author and filmmaker Alain Guiraudie to devise the edition 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.

In 2025, we will be honored to welcome the dj and voguer Kiddy Smile as the guest curator for an edition in the patrimonial neighborhood St-Sernin, with a programme focused on families, bonds and love.