Patrick Gyger

Explorer, Producer, Project manager, Promoter, Writer/Editor

Patrick Gyger is a Swiss historian, writer and curator (born in Brazil, 1971). From 1999 to 2010, he was the director of Maison d’Ailleurs in Switzerland, a museum housing one of the world’s largest collections of Utopia. As such, he has organised dozens of exhibitions and events and published extensively. In parallel, he was also the artistic director of Utopiales, international festival in Nantes (2001 to 2005). Since January 2011, he serves as director of le lieu unique, center for contemporary culture in Nantes (www.lelieuunique.com), a leading pluridisciplinary venue for theater, dance, visuals arts, music and literature. It is open year-round from morning to late at night and presents dozens of projects per year. As well as featuring major contemporary artists in all fields (Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Robert Lepage, Thomas Ostermeier, Boris Charmatz, Patti Smith, Christoph Marthaler,…), his programme gives an important place to outsider practices, art brut, media artists and interdisciplinary approaches. In recent years le lieu unique has coproduced touring exhibitions on topics such as video games, collaborative architecture and utopian theater spaces, or with artists such as Ryoji Ikeda, Robert Henke and Pascal Dusapin. In 2017, a major event called Nantes < > Japon was organised to promote art and cultural practices around disabiliy from Japan. Patrick Gyger has also lectured widely including at the European Space Agency, the Library of Congress (Washington), la Gaîté Lyrique (Paris), HEAD (Geneva), the University of Lausanne, as well as in Japan, Canada, Ireland, etc. He was also Guest Curator at the Barbican Center (London), Europe’s biggest cultural center, for an exhibition which opened in Summer 2017. In 2014, Gyger was appointed Honorary Consul of Switzerland in Nantes. In 2017, he was made a knight in the order of arts and letters in France.