Une Kunshtalle à Lausanne. Histoires d’un serpent de mer

There is no Kunsthalle in Lausanne.

This book recounts four significant initiatives, between 1924 and 1995, to create a place exclusively devoted to art in the making. None of them came to fruition, for a variety of reasons that this collection explores. These little-known and little-documented episodes tell the story of how, in different decades, winds of hope and utopia blew briefly, before running out of steam and fading away. Projects that were sometimes rooted in the local context, sometimes clearly international in scope, betting on the influence of the regional scene towards the outside world, or on the contribution of the outside world to local creation, a mixture of centrifugal and centripetal forces that succeeded in energizing a region too long complexed by its own provincialism.

As a follow-up to this volume, which focuses on the historical dimension, a second book is in preparation, which seeks to identify the expectations of Lausanne’s art scene in terms of contemporary art, and to sound out opinions on the oft-talked-about subject of a Kunsthalle in Lausanne.