ARCHIVES 2018 / A History of the Festival d’Avignon in 72 posters

72 editions and as many posters.A history expressed every summer through a graphic, artistic, and political gesture. What do those posters tell us? What stories do they reinvent? In 45 minutes, Olivier Py, director of the Festival d'Avignon, plays at re-creating the periods, the directions, the complicities with talented graphic designers, the invitations to genius painters, the doubts about censored propositions. When the colours of France covered paper, when the turn towards the international introduced different tones and writings, when the mask became fold and the key disappeared! The history of the Festival is also that of a mineral city, of a country which believes in decentralisation, and more broadly of men and women who have always read in the sky and the stars...

Olivier Py
In 2013, Olivier Py became the first artist to be appointed director of the Festival d'Avignon since Jean Vilar. A director for the theatre, the opera, and cinema, but also an actor and poet, Olivier Py anchors his work in his contemporaries' preoccupations, in order to open up a poetic and political dialogue about the life of the individual as part of a community. Theatre is his culture and his instrument: with him, words become actions, without losing sight of the fact that this gesture—a poem—could one day be the basis of new democratic forms.