About us
International Festival
More inclusive than ever and driven by the constantly renewed enthusiasm of its 55,000 visitors, Antigel has been bringing together audiences and disciplines and enhancing the cultural heritage of a whole region since its beginnings in 2011, by offering three intense weeks of cultural safari throughout 23 Geneva municipalities. Music, dance, theatre, clubbing, after-work events, sports and cross-disciplinary creations, Antigel’s programme spreads to the far corners of the Canton, turning a frosty Geneva into the liveliest and most animated city in all of Switzerland.
Our history
Festival Antigel was born in 2011 from a desire to decentralise culture and take it to municipalities on the outskirts of Geneva in order to enhance and diversify cultural events throughout the region. The festival’s foundations are based on the idea of bringing a quality and accessible artistic programme, including music, dance and other performances into unusual and unique venues.
Over 10 years, Antigel has opened the doors to more than 100 venues and visited 43 of the 45 municipalities in Geneva, in addition to 3 cross-border municipalities in the Greater Geneva region. Concerts, dance shows, performances, exhibitions, sports sessions with music, artistic walks and trails followed by a local buffet, club nights and many other atypical events came into being and welcomed a keen, inter-generational audience from all walks of life.
Among the most innovative events, have been concerts and shows in thermal baths, public swimming-pools and gravel pits, at Geneva Airport, in the warehouse of Geneva’s Public Transportation Network (TPG), the Serbecco recycling plant, the Botanic Gardens, the UN, in churches and chapels, Geneva University Hospitals and many other.
These unique venues, transformed into multidisciplinary stages, invite audiences into usually inaccessible places which they get to see in a new light, well off the beaten track, in peri-urban and rural areas, thus providing them with the opportunity to enjoy new cultural experiences in a unique setting.
Since the first festival, more than 500 shows have taken place, hosting close to 250,000 visitors on a network of stages that cover a surface of more than 400 kilometres.
Antigel has made it its mission to offer a quality and accessible performing arts’ festival where everyone can enjoy an artistic crush and share new and fun experiences, all this with the idea of offering a new perspective on Geneva by bringing together audiences and disciplines in the whole region.