Next edition imagined by matali crasset form June 2 to July 2, 2023 

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 edition of the festival co-curated with matali crasset will roll out in Toulouse from June 2-July 2, 2023, on the sidewalks and in the museums, stores and parks of the Saint-Cyprien neighborhood. Exhibitions, site-specific projects, public installations, encounters, a pop-up school and parties... The program will be released in February 2023.

matali crasset

matali crasset is a French female designer of international renown. She advocates for design at the intersection of artistic, anthropological and social practices, and works for design as a creative, living and routine act: how can design contribute to social cohesion and guide us in the contemporary world? This simple yet eminently political question allows her to think and work "in movement."

After graduating from Les Ateliers-ENSCI in the 1990s and working with Philippe Starck before founding her own studio, over the last thirty years, she has invented a unique trajectory, nurtured by the hundreds of projects she has developed, spanning architecture, set design, object design, furniture or interior decoration.

She maintains strong links with contemporary art: she has conceived spaces for art venues (Consortium Museum in Dijon or the dododo book for Shanghai's Power Station of Art) and has regularly collaborated with artists, such as Peter Halley and, more recently, Roberto Guoghi. Her works have been shown in cultural institutions in France and overseas, and feature in the design collections of museums such as MoMA in New York and the Pompidou Center in Paris. 

Her design without borders or territory is the expression of a profound belief in the creative process as a human, social and ecological project. For the expression of projects is not solely dependent on their realization, but on the process itself and the ability to establish connections, and create networks of exchange and reciprocity between individuals and the natural environment. And so, each project becomes a shared experience.

PRESS CONTACTS : AGNÈS RENOULT COMMUNICATION

lenouveauprintemps (at) agnesrenoult.com / + 33 (0)1 87 44 25 25

National press : Saba Agri — international press : Vilma Gertane

Local and regional press : Agathe Delcourt : a.delcourt (at) lenouveauprintemps.com / + 33 (0) 6 88 95 62 14