Sylvain Menétrey

As I have now been living in Paris for many years, I do not experience Lausanne’s art scene as intensely as I used to. But I still always book a seat on the Lyria TGV for LUFF, the festival that promotes the discovery of inspiring and unconventional artists such as JX Williams, Cameron Jamie, or the collective Kuzoku-ku who were present last year and showcased a new Japan, one populated by compulsive patchenko players and glue sniffers. For photography, the Elysée Museum now has an excellent library, well stocked and run by a passionate and chatty librarian.

Other more alternative exhibition spaces that I like are Curtat Tunnel, which organised beautiful shows, especially that of the brothers Stéphane and Laurent Kropf in the cellar of a squat in the old town, and which has now moved to the old bus shelter of the Place du Tunnel. The curators have intercontinental connections, mixing young local artists with Californian ones, exhibiting music sheets and putting on performances. We can drink warm beers on the square or by the parking and then go eat a bobun in one of the area’s Asian restaurants. Lausanne bohemia. In another league, I always follow the Lucy Mackintosh Gallery’s programme, this impossible-to-categorise gallery defies fashions and, it seems, exists beyond the market. Nevertheless it manages, maybe because of this, to put on shows that are often surprising, always coherent and of a very high calibre, playing on the cornerstone between art, architecture and design.