A Daring and Inclusive Creative Festival in the Heart of Lausanne
Each summer, the Festival de la Cité turns Lausanne’s historic streets into a vibrant open-air celebration of art, identity, and defiance. For an entire week, the city pulses with experimental theater, bold music, radiant drag, and late-night dance floors. The 2025 edition invites everyone into a space where resistance shimmers with glitter, and art becomes a joyful act of rebellion. Free and fiercely expressive, it’s a celebration of community, creativity, and queer spirit.
Fearless Bodies and Unfiltered Theater
This year’s stage productions delve deep into themes of vulnerability, intimacy, and radical presence. From poetic disruptions to politically charged performances, they challenge the norm with emotion, movement, and message.
Armour – Arno Ferrera & Gilles Polet
Featuring three cis-male performers, this acrobatic performance questions traditional masculinity through movement rooted in touch, fragility, and trust. With every lift, fall, and embrace, “Armour” becomes a soft, physical rejection of toxic norms—a choreography of solidarity and consent.
Medieval Crack – Collectif Foulles & Clovis Maillet
A smart, subversive dive into queer medieval history. Flavorful and rich with humor, this performance reimagines monastic life through a queer lens—trading in knights for glittered monks and illuminated rebellion. History has never felt this festive.
Insuline – Lou Lepori
Bold and deeply moving, Insuline combines music, poetry, and physical storytelling to explore chronic illness and queer trauma. Merging personal history with political urgency, it radiates like a sonic confession—raw, poetic, and unforgettable.
Unapologetic Beats and Revolutionary Sounds
From icy synths and punk anthems to sweaty reggaeton and lush auto-tuned ballads—the festival’s music lineup invites you to dance, rage, and reconnect. It’s a radical soundtrack for a generation ready to resist and rejoice.
- Laurène Marx – The Sun Also Rises for the Outcasts
A cold wave anthem for the marginalized, weaving punk energy and militant poetry. With collectives Rok & Dudu on board, Laurène delivers an emotional, political performance that hits both heart and gut. - FIAH MIAU
Expect high-voltage reggaeton blended with eurodance, techno, and Latin Core. A sonic uprising that’s both sweet and scorching—designed for sweat-drenched liberation on the dance floor. - talu
Belgian artist talu blurs genres, combining cloud rap, melancholic pop, and sensual ASMR. Their music captures a queer kind of loneliness—alienated, dreamy, and defiantly vulnerable.
Late-Night Liberation at Tridel
When the sun sets, Tridel—an old industrial space—comes alive with radical energy. It becomes a space of sonic catharsis: where dance becomes discourse, and raving is resistance.
- Yajaira La Beyaca & Genosidra
Disruptive and dazzling, this duo blends reggaeton with charged performance art. A showdown of bodies, basslines, and boundary-breaking visuals. - rEmPiT g0dDe$$
A high-decibel dose of cyberpunk feminism. Expect a genre-defying mix of deep techno, South Asian rhythms, and unapologetic attitude—radical and unforgettable.
Ambient Escapes: Sacred Queer Soundscapes
In the stillness between the noise, these artists offer sonic spaces of healing and reflection. Quiet but never passive, their ambient performances echo against cathedral walls and deep within the soul.
- Cole Pulice
Introspective saxophone loops and soft electronics drift into ambient jazz dreams. A tender, almost sacred invitation to feel deeply—perfect for crying, healing, and collective exhale. - Tony Njoku
Delicate vocals layered with experimental textures, rooted in Afro-diasporic influences. Their sound unapologetically challenges musical conventions, laying the groundwork for new personal and political narratives.
A Celebration of Chaos, Courage, and Connection
Far more than a festival, the Festival de la Cité 2025 is a meeting point for radical joy, resistance, and transformation. In a world fraying at the edges, it offers rituals of healing and revolt—through movement, voice, and collective fire.
✅ What to Expect
- Free & welcoming: An open-access festival embracing bodies, minds, and identities without barriers.
- Queer & radical: Spaces carved out for gender expression, protest art, and refusal of the norm.
- Electrifying & intimate: From high-octane performances to soft contemplative corners—it’s a multi-sensory journey.
Come as you are—or who you’ve always dreamed of being. Let the rhythm guide you, let the art transform you. Somewhere between ancient stones and vivid lights, a revolution awaits.