Rivers of Transformation: How Lyon's Biennale Navigates Between Art, Industry, and Environment

On a warm September evening in 2023, when the Rhône and Saône rivers of Lyon seemed especially luminous against the twilight sky, a small group gathered inside Les Grandes Locos, a cavernous former train maintenance facility on the city's outskirts. In this vast industrial cathedral, Isabelle Bertolotti, Director of both the Lyon Biennale and the Museum of Contemporary Art Lyon, was unveiling her vision for the 17th edition to a select group of artists, curators, and civic leaders. The theme she proposed—"Les voix des fleuves, Crossing the water"—was not merely metaphorical but deeply intertwined with Lyon's geography and cultural identity.

"We don't just live beside rivers in Lyon," Bertolotti told the assembly, her voice echoing in the industrial space. "We live through them. They have shaped every aspect of our city's development—economic, architectural, cultural. And now, in our current moment of environmental crisis, they offer a lens through which to understand our changing relationship with the natural world."

This scene marked the beginning of an 18-month journey that would culminate in one of the most ambitious editions of the Lyon Biennale to date. But it also represented something more profound: a reflection of how this biennial has, over three decades, established itself as one of the most distinctive and influential contemporary art events in the world, constantly reinventing itself while maintaining deep connections to its local context.

The Lyon Biennale was born in 1991 from a confluence of factors—both practical and philosophical—that continue to shape its identity. Following the closure of the Paris Biennale in 1985, there was an opening for a major contemporary art event outside the French capital. Thierry Raspail, founding director of Lyon's Museum of Contemporary Art, seized this opportunity with a unique curatorial approach. Rather than appointing a different artistic director for each edition, Lyon would maintain continuity through a stable directorial position while inviting guest curators to develop specific exhibitions.

This model—unusual in the biennial world, where complete reinvention is often the norm—has allowed Lyon to develop a distinctive identity over time, balancing institutional continuity with fresh artistic perspectives. As Jean-Hubert Martin, who curated the 2000 edition, noted, it was "a clever way of having themes addressed through the personalities of others."

Lyon's history as a city shaped by water and industry provided fertile ground for artistic exploration. Once the silk-weaving capital of Europe, later a center for chemical and mechanical industries, Lyon's urban fabric bears the imprint of its industrial past. The Biennale's genius has been to turn this history into an asset, repurposing former factories, warehouses, and industrial sites as dramatic venues for contemporary art.

The transformation of Cockatoo Island for the Sydney Biennale may be more famous internationally, but Lyon's industrial conversions preceded it by more than a decade. The 2003 edition, for instance, utilized the former refrigerated halls of Lyon's slaughterhouses, creating a powerful juxtaposition between art concerned with life and spaces once dedicated to death. More recently, the massive Fagor factory, which once produced household appliances, became a centerpiece venue, its vast scale challenging artists to work at dimensions previously unimaginable.

The current edition's use of Les Grandes Locos—former SNCF train maintenance facilities—continues this tradition. These industrial conversions are not merely pragmatic solutions to exhibition space shortages; they represent a philosophical position about the relationship between art and society, history and futurity, labor and creativity.

"These spaces carry memory in their walls," explains curator Alexia Fabre, who collaborated with Bertolotti on the 17th edition. "When artists create work for such environments, they enter into dialogue not just with architectural volume but with the ghosts of industrial labor, with the histories of production and the communities that once animated these spaces."

This sensitivity to site has become one of Lyon's distinctive features in the crowded international biennial landscape. Unlike events that simply import global art stars and their existing works, Lyon has increasingly emphasized site-responsive commissions that could not exist anywhere else. In the 2022 edition, for instance, Lebanese artist Mounira Al Solh created an installation that drew parallels between Lyon's silk-weaving history and textile traditions in her native Beirut, creating a transcultural dialogue about labor, gender, and craft.

The Biennale's engagement with water—particularly through its current edition—represents another facet of this site-sensitivity. Lyon's position at the confluence of two major rivers has shaped its development for over two millennia. The Rhône and Saône have been transport routes, power sources, waste disposal systems, and sites of leisure. Today, they also represent frontlines in the climate crisis, with rising water levels and increased flooding events threatening the city's riverbanks.

By making rivers the thematic centerpiece of the 17th edition, the Biennale connects local geography to global concerns. "Rivers don't recognize national boundaries," notes Bertolotti. "They flow across territories, carrying not just water but stories, pollutants, species, cultural influences. In many ways, they're the perfect metaphor for the kind of transcultural dialogue contemporary art aspires to create."

This approach exemplifies how the Lyon Biennale has managed to be simultaneously locally rooted and globally relevant—a balance that many biennials struggle to achieve. Too often, international art events become untethered from their host cities, creating generic global art platforms that could exist anywhere. Others become overly parochial, failing to connect local concerns to broader artistic and social currents.

Lyon's success lies in treating locality not as a limitation but as a lens through which universal questions can be refracted. The city's industrial past becomes a way to examine post-industrial transformation globally; its riverine geography becomes a means to explore ecological interdependence worldwide; its position in France becomes a vantage point for examining post-colonial relationships, particularly with francophone Africa and the Middle East.

As the Biennale looks to the future, this balance between local specificity and global relevance will remain crucial. Catherine Nichols, already announced as curator for the 18th edition in 2026, will inherit an institution that has firmly established its distinctive place in the biennial landscape—not by chasing trends or courting controversy, but by building a consistent curatorial vision that treats Lyon not just as a backdrop but as a collaborator in the creation of meaning.

In a world where biennials sometimes seem like interchangeable nodes in a global art circuit, Lyon reminds us that the most compelling contemporary art is often that which speaks from somewhere specific to questions that concern us all. Like the rivers that define its host city, the Lyon Biennale continues to flow between the particular and the universal, between industrial history and ecological futurity, between French cultural tradition and global artistic innovation—creating currents of meaning that extend far beyond its banks.