A 6-week Biennial to celebrate all resources, lively and joyful, exploratory and festive. From May 22 to July 6, 2025.
In its broadest sense, the term “Ressource” is intended to cover not only natural resources, but also human, cultural and intellectual resources. This Biennale takes a cautious approach to exploring these resources, inviting us to foresee the future. The question is no longer whether there is change, but how we will live with it.
More than any other discipline, design represents a key to accompanying change and influencing our behaviour, our lifestyles, our ways of living and consuming, and our relationships with environments and people. By nature, designers listen to the times, observe and experiment with ideas and concepts for the future. They help to chart new trajectories and shape imaginary worlds.
“In English, the word design means to draw. It means to draw with elegance, with precision, sometimes under an apparent technological simplicity. Design thus reveals an aesthetic, the beauty of a gesture, an attention, an object, a space, a way of being and working, a creative and innovative approach. Beauty is necessary, but design expresses itself fully when it transmits values of presence to the world and to others”. Éric Jourdan, General Curator of the Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Étienne 2025, General Director of the Cité du design-Ésad Saint-Étienne.
This year’s Biennial is all about designers and young creators ! The next Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Étienne is a resource in itself. Far from being a mere showcase, it’s an event that provides an opportunity to see, think and discuss how design can, through its responsible creative approach, change our relationship with the world. It reveals an exciting creative breeding ground.
“Through their project-based culture, their ability to manage constraints and their responsible creative approach, designers explore, experiment and invent new, virtuous ways of acting, to get away from the extract/transform/discard equation. It seemed obvious to us to question designers directly in order to identify with them the resources in the sense of means of action with which they are already working today to prepare for tomorrow. For the Biennial’s thematic exhibition, I invited nine designers to join me in the delicate exercise of curating and selecting over 150 projects. Laurence Salmon, design historian, director of cultural and artistic development at the Cité du design, scientific director of the Biennial, general curator of the thematic exhibition Ressource(s), présager demain.
This unmissable event, the only one of its kind in France, brings together the innovations generated by schools, agencies, independent designers, distributors, companies and a wide variety of audiences. All audiences – children, adults, amateurs and professionals, the curious and the specialized – are invited to discover a collective concentration of experiments and concrete solutions, a veritable contemporary laboratory for the thoughts and challenges of design and our society.
This 13th edition brings design within everyone’s reach – everyday, original design – with 425 designers’ projects, presented in 9 exhibitions at La Platine de la Cité du design and Les Halles Barrouin. More than 250 designers and 300 art and design students open up reasoned, sensible alternatives in a world of change and mutation.
Saint-Étienne has just twinned with the town of Kapan, in Armenia, and this Biennial is an opportunity to showcase the country’s contemporary art.
“En relief, créer en Arménie is conceived as an immersion in the geography of contemporary Armenian creation, which leads us more towards questions of resources, the theme of this Biennial 2025. Rather than focusing on a chronology of Armenian design styles or influences, our curatorial approach highlights the materials, local know-how, customs and imaginaries that shape Armenian design today. It reveals how Armenian designers adapt to the specificities of a territory rich in relief, and how they transform the human and natural resources of this mountainous country into engines of innovation”. Nairi Khatchadourian, art historian, curator (AHA collective), curator with Jean-François Dingjian and Eloi Chafaï (Normal Studio) of the exhibition En relief, créer en Arménie.
Exhibitions, events, festive weekends, workshops, meetings, conferences and shared creations are all on the program for this 13th Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Étienne. It’s going to be a major design celebration across the whole of Saint-Etienne, and one that will resonate far beyond.
Discover more at Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Étienne
