In its third year, the Printemps de septembre is confirming and consolidatingits implantation in a town that has welcomed it with generosity and enthusiasm. This year sees the duration of the exhibitions (which remain free for all visitors) extended by a week and the art trail gain a new venue, the Maison éclusière and the Musée du Vieux Toulouse. The programme of late-night events is also being strengthened. In all, 46 French and international artists will be showing work here at the invitation of Marta Gili, the artistic director and curator, and Fabienne Fulchéri, the assistant curator. Thus, for both its scale and its richness, the Printemps can bear comparison with leading art around the world.

In 2002, the Printemps was structured around the theme of "Fragilities". This provided a sensitive way of re-establishing the links between art and life, for these fragilities are our own, as we are only too well aware, and artists speak to us about such things in their own way in their work, either directly or indirectly, not in the language of analysis but in that of forms, sensations and emotion. "Gestures", this year's theme, can be seen as an extension of this experience. The gestures in question are responses to that vulnerability; we make them in order to protect, support, tend or express the need to share. They are the active or reactive side of the evidence of our fragility.

Like last year's, this printemps has a pronounced political content, in the widest and best sense of the term. In other words, it is concerned with individuals in the city, with their relations with the other, their freedom, their ethics, their commitments, in the most banal and the most nobel aspects of existence. 

Naturally, all this takes on a wide variety of forms in the work of the artists, forms that may be playful or grave, unexpected and sometimes upsetting. Photographs, videos and installations are even more thoroughly bound up together here than before in these contemporary styles in which the artists invent new relations to the world and new ways of thinking about the world that owe nothing to the ponderous dominant rhetorics. 

It is this innovative freshness that the Printemps de septembre invites you to discover, and to turn into your own personal adventure. 

Marie-Thérèse Perrin

festival president