Paléo Festival 2015

Tickets for the 40th Paléo Festival Nyon will be available from Wednesday 22 April 2015, at 12.

The line-up will be revealed on Tuesday 14 April 2015.

The Festival will take place from 20 to 26 July 2015.

Forty editions, that’s worth a celebration! And if possible, a long one. And so we are happy, oh so happy, to announce that the 2015 Festival is granting itself an extra day of festivities! Yes, you got it right, SEVEN days, or one whole week of concerts, emotions and frank camaraderie! Make a note of it on the back of your hand, Paléo will be opening its doors not on Tuesday 21, but the day before on Monday 20 July. The organisers are looking forward to welcoming you a day earlier than usual for an edition that promises to be full of surprises and new projects specially concocted for the occasion. All the practical info about the organisation of this day will be made available at a later date.

Get your 6 or 7-day pass for the 40th Paléo Festival Nyon as from Tuesday 2 December!

If there’s a seventh day, then there must be a seven-day Festival pass! During our traditional Xmas special offer period, from midday on Tuesday 2 December to midday on Friday 19 December, you will be able to buy your 6 or 7-day pass for the 40th edition of the Festival.

More information

Agenda

And now, a quick summary of important dates to pen in your agenda:

We also remind you that the "Village du Monde" will be vibrating to the sounds, colours and flavours of the Far East.

Today, Paléo Festival Nyon is unveiling the poster for its 40th edition. It represents a multi-coloured visual universe, featuring colourful figures that mirror the heterogeneous nature of the Festival’s audience.

Keen to explore new graphic horizons for its 40th anniversary, Paléo invited five graphic design agencies from Switzerland to take part in a competition for the creation of its visual identity for 2015. The winner is BaseDesign from Geneva, an agency specialised in brand identity and who won over the jury with their playful and highly colourful project. Part of an international network of creative studios, active for over twenty years in Brussels and New York, BaseDesign have distinguished themselves by an original approach that gives pride of place to the synergy between strategy, experience and intuition.

A Festival that reflects its audience

The idea that guided the process of creation of these visuals could be resumed in one phrase: "Paléo is my Festival!" For Hervé Rigal of BaseDesign, Paléo is part of our own personal and collective stories and in some ways belongs to each and every one of us, through the different souvenirs that link us to it. By including a series of illustrations representing a host of emblematic instants from the Festival, the agency wanted to include diversity and lived experiences, but also pay tribute to the spectators and staff of Paléo.

The numerous handmade drawings and their lively, seventies-inspired colours are a reminder of posters from the past, a timely nod in the direction of the event’s origins. Developed according to the style of the “exquisite corpse”, these very diversified illustrations, in which childhood images are mixed with trash details, offer a great variety of combinations and nuances. By drawing a composite portrait of the people who have made it possible for the Festival to exist, the poster and its various derivatives aim at a form of identification and appropriation by its audience. As with the Festival’s line-up, everyone will surely find something to enjoy.

To celebrate its anniversary, Paléo has chosen to pay tribute to its audience and staff, the people that have been its lifeblood for the past 40 years.

This year’s winner of the competition organised in partnership with the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD, HES-SO) is Bilal Sebei, currently a second–year student in visual communication. Only twenty years old, Bilal loves taking risks and swimming against the tide, and is proud to present a highly original poster, both vibrant and non-conformist, the result of a good deal of research and experimentation.

The image of sound

It all started with an idea: integrating sound into the process of visual creation, thus creating an image from sound itself. Then followed a period of experimentation during which the young graphic artist searched for the technical means to realise his ambitious project. "I started by creating a letterpress composition on paper, which for me was already a representation of the rhythm", he explains. Then, with the help of a scanner placed upside down on a bass speaker connected to a rhythm box, he concocted a do-it-yourself installation allowing him to use the sound vibrations to animate and move the graphic elements of his poster.

In order to bring his typographic design to life, Bilal composed his own musical rhythm, finding inspiration in a drumming sample. "At first, I wanted to use an existing piece of music, but then I asked myself: ‘why choose one song or musical style rather than another?’ and so I decided to create my own sound." Initially adopting a "hand-made" approach, it was only in the latter stages of the creative process that he started using a computer, notably in order to perfect the shapes and incorporate the colour. He opted for a dominant bright red, which in his eyes illustrates the intensity of the Paléo adventure, the dynamic and festive dimension of moments of lived experience during the festival.

The final version of the image conserves the grain of the paper and is deliberately raw and cutaway in appearance. "I conceived this visual in the spirit of Punk, and didn’t want it to be too frozen or rigid, too clean or sterilized! I wanted it to be like a slap in the face that surprises the spectator, enabling him or her to feel the movement and pulsations of the Festival."