Among the idyllic lakes and lush vineyards of French-speaking Switzerland, just hours away from Basel, Paris, and Milan, there’s a burgeoning contemporary art scene. While Geneva is undoubtedly the region’s artistic center of gravity, in the last 30 years, the rest of Romandy – as the area is known in Switzerland – has seen its cultural ecosystem become more diverse and professionalized.

The 2022 inauguration of Lausanne’s new museum hub, Plateforme 10, located near the city’s main train station, is a major symbol of this change. Its creation cast a public spotlight on visual arts in the country’s fourth largest city, a place better known for theater and dance. However, a tight-knit network of artists, independent spaces, and small institutions have been the driving forces behind the region’s increasingly visible, and increasingly global, cultural cache.

Inaugurated in 2021, the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne was the first to open its doors in Plateforme 10. For several decades, the MCBA squeezed its collections into its old building, but now it’s able to spread out in a vast, monolithic brick construction on the site of a former train depot designed by the Catalan architecture firm Barozzi Veiga. 

The new museum showcases its permanent collection as well as contemporary projects with an international scope, such as the recent Francis Alÿs retrospective and an exhibition of the British artist Lubaina Himid, produced in collaboration with the Tate Modern. MCBA also puts on local artists, like last year’s solo exhibition by Sarah Margnetti, winner of the 2022 Prix Culturel Manor.

In 2022, two other prestigious institutions – Photo Elysée and the Museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts – joined MCBA at Plateforme 10, in a second building designed by Manuel and Francisco Aires Mateus. The museum district’s grand opening reflects the city’s ambition to put itself on the map as a leader for the arts in Switzerland.

However, unlike Geneva, Lausanne doesn’t have a center for contemporary art in the style of a kunsthalle, the institutional model that’s an essential part of Switzerland’s cultural ecosystem not only in large Swiss cities, but in a significant number of smaller towns as well.

In Fribourg for example, Friart was established at the beginning of the 1990s in a former cardboard factory. Ever since, the art center overlooking the Sarine river has hosted almost 200 exhibitions by international and Swiss artists, many of whom hail from the area, like Elise Corpataux. Thanks to a change in management every five years – a principle set out in the institution’s statutes – Friart is directed by people at the start of their careers, which keeps it closely linked to younger local artists. After more than 30 years, Friart continues to stand out with its radical programming and focus on the next generation of artists.

The Centre d’art Neuchâtel, founded in 1995 in the lakeside town of Neuchâtel, has had success with a non-hierarchical approach. In the past, it was led by the current director of Geneva’s Museum of Art and History, Marc-Olivier Wahler, but now the CAN no longer has a director, and is instead managed by a team of six people with expertise in different fields. The team collectively makes decisions regarding programming, management, and logistics, an organizational style reflecting the communal spirit that has historically governed the creation of many of Switzerland’s art centers since the establishment of the Kunsthalle Basel in 1869. The latest kunsthalles in the region were founded in 2013 in Yverdon-les-Bains, and in 2015 at La Chaux-de-Fonds.

In Lausanne, independent art spaces are responsible for promoting regional contemporary art as well as facilitating contact and dialogue on a national and international scale. The town has more than 15 art spaces, most of them managed by volunteering artists. The oldest of these still in operation is CIRCUIT, founded in 1998 by a group of artists eager to resuscitate a stagnant state of affairs for local art. Since 2005 it’s been located in an old industrial building on the edge of railroad tracks. The artist-run space, whose longevity defies the often-transitory nature of experimental organizations, is still managed by the same collective, bolstered by the addition of new members over the years.

Tunnel Tunnel was founded in 2016 by a collective that took over a space in an abandoned bus stop. Now run by artists Guillaume Pilet and Sophie Ballmer, Tunnel Tunnel is primarily dedicated to emerging local artists. Aside from their exhibitions, it also contributes to Lausanne’s cultural sector by advocating for better policies and public support for contemporary art. A few years ago, Tunnel Tunnel organized all of the independent art spaces in Lausanne to form a collective body that speaks to political authorities with one voice. This grassroots effort has resulted in municipal subsidies for independent art spaces, which are essential for the survival and flourishing of contemporary art in Lausanne.

The lack of a formal institution entirely dedicated to contemporary art seems paradoxical for a town that has one of the most prestigious art schools in Europe: the École Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne, usually referred to as ECAL. Since 2007, it’s been based in a renovated industrial building in Renens, a suburb of Lausanne. ECAL, which recently celebrated its 200th tanniversary, now counts almost 600 students across visual arts, design, photography and cinema. Some of the artists who have studied there include Claudia Comte, Cyprien Gaillard and Valentin Carron.

With renowned photographer and graphic artist Pierre Keller’s appointment as director of the school in 1995, Lausanne slowly started to gain an international reputation as a hub for art and design. Thanks to his global network (he was a friend of Keith Haring’s) and his tenacity, Keller contributed not only to the school’s development but also to the artistic flourishing of the city and region. This period of growth also saw the creation of the contemporary art festival Les Urbaines, known for its radical programming and highlighting of the porosity between creative disciplines in French-speaking Switzerland.

Swiss hyper-regionalism has little to no relevance for the current crop of local artists. Now more than ever, they are working across the country and beyond its borders. Among the artists in or from the region that are gaining international recognition, there’s the artist duo RM (formerly known as Real Madrid), Louisa Gagliardi, Nicolas Party, and Julian Charrière. It’s also increasingly common for art students to cross Switzerland’s linguistic borders to study in a different region, while the three art schools in French-speaking Switzerland – ECAL in Lausanne, HEAD in Geneva, and EDHEA in Sierre – all take in a significant number of international students.

Over the past few years, Romandy has demonstrated its importance in Switzerland’s cultural landscape, thanks in part to major demographic and economic growth in the region. Beyond the region’s museums and independent art centers, it’s the artists themselves that have made the region so dynamic.

The artist residency La Becque was inaugurated in 2018 and is one of the most salient examples of this double process of growth and internationalization. Created in the village of La Tour-de-Peilz, a blissful setting on the shores of Lake Geneva, La Becque is directed by Luc Meier, who will also program this year's Messeplatz project at Art Basel in Basel, together with the artist Latifa Echakhch. The residency hosts artists working across visual art, performance, and music to explore the connections between nature and technology.

Every year, more than 20 Swiss and international residents are invited to spend a few months in one of the modern apartment-cum-studios that were built by the Swiss architectural agency Pont12. In this beatific environment, they can work on a project or focus on research. The spectacular landscape stretching before them is undoubtedly an inspiration, as it has been to artists for centuries.

Simon W Marin is an art historian, independent curator, and editor based in Lausanne and Zurich.

English translation: Catherine Bennett. 

Published on June 8, 2023.

Captions for full-bleed images, from top to bottom: 1. Lake Geneva. 2. The streets of Lausanne, with the MCBA in the background. 3. Inside Friart. 4. Guillaume Pilet and Sophie Ballmer of Tunnel Tunnel. 5 and 6. The shores of Lake Geneva in Lausanne. All photos and videos by Matthieu Croizier for Art Basel.