A Living and Subversive Tradition in the Heart of Lausanne

Each summer, the Festival de la Cité transforms the cobbled streets of Lausanne into open-air stages alive with performance, community, and joyful rebellion. From experimental theater and radical music to fiery after-parties and shimmering drag performances, the 2025 edition promises a pulsating week of inclusive celebration, queer energy, and creative explosion. Free and fiercely expressive, it’s a festival where glitter meets protest, and art becomes collective resistance.

Raw Bodies, Powerful Theater

The stage performances this year explore the intersection of movement, fragility, and political intensity. Bold and experimental, the shows reflect shared emotion, poetic disruption, and radical tenderness.

Armour – Arno Ferrera & Gilles Polet

Three cis-male performers engage in an acrobatic dance full of vulnerable masculinity. With lifts, falls, and embraces, they subvert traditional ideas of manhood through movement filled with gentleness and consent—like a carefully choreographed hug that refuses toxic norms.

Medieval Crack – Collectif Foulles & Clovis Maillet

Dive into a queer reimagining of the Middle Ages. This playful, intellectual piece sheds light on hidden queer histories in monastic spaces with humor and shimmering creativity. Forget the macho knights—make space for festive abbeys and glittered chronicles.

Insuline – Lou Lepori

A visceral performance blending themes of chronic illness, queer memory, and intimate violence. It is deeply affecting yet radiantly performed, somewhere between the emotional depths of PJ Harvey and the raw intensity of Virginie Despentes—anchored by piano, pain, and poetry.

Rebellious Sounds: From Cold Wave to Political Reggaeton

Get ready to move, cry, and revolt—sometimes all at once. This musical lineup is a radical mix of dystopian beats, nostalgic textures, and unapologetic joy.

• Laurène Marx – The Sun Also Rises for the Outcasts
  A punk prayer for precarious queers. Backed by cold wave and new wave sounds, Laurène takes the stage with collectives Rok & Dudu for a defiant, sonic slam laced with militant poetry.
• FIAH MIAU
  A hyperactive cocktail of reggaeton, techno, eurodance, and Latin Core. Each track is a dancefloor rebellion—sweaty, sunlit, and dressed for revolution.
• talu
  A hybrid Belgian act blending melancholic pop, cloud rap, and erotic ASMR. With autotuned vocals, their music explores self-alienation, queer longing, and the social burnout of our times.

Electrifying Afters and Radical Nights at Tridel

As darkness falls, Tridel—once an industrial factory—becomes the stage for politically charged raves. Think sauna vibes, hot bodies, and beats that threaten to spark uprising. Here, every movement is protest, every drop a call to liberation.

• Yajaira La Beyaca & Genosidra – Hypnotic reggaeton meets electrified resistance. Blistering dance floors, molten performance art, and bodies that challenge every binary.
• rEmPiT g0dDe$$ – A techno-futurist fusion of South-Asian grooves, deep bass, and cyberpunk feminism. Radical, feral, unforgettable.

Mystical Pause: Queer Ambient Jazz

Looking to float above the chaos? These artists offer sonic refuge—quiet, mesmerizing, yet politically charged. In dialogue with Lausanne’s cathedral, their music becomes sacred ceremony for those who don’t fit into traditional molds.

• Cole Pulice – An ambient jazz journey through saxophone loops and soft synth layers. Like crying together in a bubble bath—you’re not alone, even in your solitude.
• Tony Njoku – Delicate falsetto meets experimental textures, rooted in an Afro-diasporic identity. A call to dismantle bourgeois classics and imagine new futures.

A Week of Poetic Chaos

More than a music and arts festival, Festival de la Cité 2025 offers a space-time bubble for shared rage, joy, tenderness, and political awakening. In the face of rising tensions and social fragmentation, it invokes collective rituals of exorcism and liberation—celebrating the power of bodies, words, and beats to shift the paradigm.

✅ Festival Highlights

• Free & accessible: Open to all, inviting bodies and identities to mix without borders.
• Queer & inclusive: A bold exploration of gender, politics, and expression, crashing through conventional limits.
• Electric & intimate: Ecstatic nights charged with urgency, gentle days soaked in warmth.

Come with your eyes shut—or wide open. Let yourself be swept away by the vibe, the poetry, the collective fire. Among old stones and neon lights, something radical is waiting.

Follow the vibrant world of Festival de la Cité behind the scenes on Instagram: @festivalcite—for real-time snapshots of queer joy, artistic sparks, and unforgettable moments in the maze-like streets of Lausanne. 📸