Editorial

“This year’s edition of Nouveau Printemps X Centre Pompidou 2027 will focus on landscapes, the narratives they convey, and the stories they tell. It will be an edition attentive to their vulnerability, their metamorphosis, their collapse or disappearance, the traces of the past they bear, and everything that inhabits or passes through them. What landscapes tell us is the ‘song of the trails’ and
the voices of witnesses; they are also the powerful and intimate bonds that landscapes maintain with memory, dreams, and desire.

To imagine this edition, we needed a landscape in and of itself, and that landscape would be Île du Ramier. An island, then-an island in the middle of a river, which itself lies in the heart of a city. An island that is by turns wild, mysterious, a utopia, a treasure island, and a bird island where the black flycatcher and the kingfisher cross paths. Marked by a long history of industry and sports-including the Poudrière, the hydroelectric plant, and the Nakache swimming pool-and now rewilded or renaturalized, Île du Ramier, once on the city’s outskirts, now opens up a vast space of freedom in the heart of the great Toulouse metropolis. It is the ideal venue for hosting a Biodiversity Forum-a space to be collectively explored in order to reinvent ourselves alongside artists, philosophers, scientists, set designers, filmmakers, writers, poets, performers, and explorers from all walks of life.

I envisaged this edition ‘as a novel’, with the opening weekend dedicated to the Biodiversity Forum and conceived as a prologue to reflect, explore and celebrate our arrival on the island, followed by the four weeks of the festival as four chapters unfolding the island adventure: arriving/mapping, exploring/researching, encountering others/engaging, and settling in.

I am delighted to be this year’s artist-in-residence for this island edition of Nouveau Printemps X Centre Pompidou, and that together we are creating this edition of bridges and walkways, of crossings and mapping, of imagination and creation - an edition dedicated to listening to and observing what the landscapes have to say.” 

Maylis de Kerangal.

Photo Credit : Francesca Mantovani / Gallimard