Opera outside the walls: Lausanne’s In Situ biennale reimagines hospitality

The word “EXPEDITIONS,” carved in capital letters across the building’s facade, sounds like an order to set out. At Lausanne’s In Situ biennale, the journey does not lead to distant lands. It begins just beyond the Flon, in an old railway goods hall at the heart of the Sébeillon industrial district.

From September 10 to 19, the former CFF hall known as Espace Amaretto will host an opera festival outside the traditional theater. The venue’s angular concrete and metal structure gives the event a setting far removed from the usual grandeur of the opera house.

Led by the Agora collective, the biennale will combine a reinterpretation of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s “Iphigénie en Tauride” with participatory creation, film and intimate recitals. The program brings the grand repertoire into contact with contemporary questions of hospitality.

In Situ presents opera as a form of action at the center of the city. Its expedition is therefore deliberately local: an attempt to leave Lausanne’s familiar cultural routes without going farther than a ten-minute walk from the city’s better-known districts.

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I hate travel and explorers.