APECIG is a Swiss non-profit association producing cultural events and artistic projects. Our formats can change from club nights and listening sessions to concerts, dance and live performance but music, sound and performance remain at the centre of what we do. We are not defined by one type of event. We are defined by the way we approach them: starting with what matters, removing what does not, and creating cultural experiences that people genuinely want to be part of.
MANIFESTO
START WITH WHAT MATTERS
A cultural event does not need to be complicated to be ambitious. A dance performance can take place in a purpose-built theatre, with a large technical team and months of production behind it. Sometimes, that is exactly what the work requires. But another performance may need little more than a good sound system, a suitable floor, the right artists and people gathered around them. Both can be powerful.We believe the scale of the structure behind an event should be determined by what the project actually needs. Instead of starting with a venue, an established format or a large production system and finding something to put inside it, we want to start with the experience itself. What should happen? Who should be there? What do the artists need? What does the audience need? What will actually make the moment better? Everything else can be questioned. Simplicity, for us, does not mean lowering our ambitions. It means putting time, money and energy where they have an actual impact.
Programming does not always have to begin with an empty timetable that needs to be filled. An event can start with an artist. Instead of deciding to organise a particular type of night and then looking for people to perform at it, we also want to sit down with artists and ask what could be created together. The format can grow around the work rather than asking the work to adapt to a format that already exists. This also means being selective. We do not want to produce projects simply because they are possible. We want to present artists and ideas that people genuinely want to experience, and then find the context in which they can work at their best. The right artist in the wrong room, at the wrong time, for the wrong audience can lose much of what makes their work interesting. Our role is not only to book artists. It is to create the conditions in which something meaningful can happen between them and an audience.
BUILT WITH ARTISTS, NOT AROUND THEM
SOUND IS NEVER SECONDARY
APECIG comes from people who have studied and worked with music and audio. This inevitably shapes the way we produce. Sound is not something we deal with once the rest of an event has been decided. It is part of the event from the beginning. The system, the room, its placement, its tuning, the listening position and the way sound interacts with a space all matter. This applies to a club night as much as a concert, a listening session or a dance performance. It applies to an event for hundreds of people and to one for a few dozen. A small event does not need a bad sound system because it is small. We are interested in sound as something that can always be improved. There is no final solution. Every room, system, artist and audience creates a different situation. We listen, test, adjust and learn, then do it again. The pursuit of better sound is not an extra layer added to our events. It is part of our identity.
Making culture accessible is more complicated than making tickets cheap. Price matters. We want our events to remain affordable whenever possible, and our lighter way of producing them should help make that possible. But a five-franc ticket means very little if other barriers still make someone feel that the event is not for them. Accessibility can be physical. It can be financial. It can come from the language used to communicate an event, from cultural codes, from the location, or simply from whether someone feels welcome there. There is another barrier that receives much less attention: having nobody to come with. We live increasingly individual lives. Yet many cultural and social events are still implicitly experienced as group activities. Going to a concert, a club or a party alone can feel unusual or uncomfortable, even when there is nothing about the event itself that requires company. For someone without the right group of friends, this can be enough not to go at all. We want to challenge that. Coming alone should feel normal. Nobody should need to assemble a group before deciding that they can experience culture. We want to create environments where a person can arrive alone without feeling out of place, spend the night that way if they want to, or meet people naturally through a shared experience. Culture can bring people together. For that to happen, people first need to feel that they can walk through the door on their own.
CULTURE PEOPLE CAN ACTUALLY TAKE PART IN
RECLAIMING CULTURAL SPACES
For many young people, their first meaningful relationship with culture does not happen in a museum. It happens at a concert. At a party. In a club. On a dancefloor.These are places where people discover music and artists, but also scenes, communities, ways of dressing, moving, thinking and expressing themselves. A dancefloor can be a cultural space just as much as a concert hall can. Yet many of these experiences now exist primarily within commercial structures. The value of a night can become tied to the number of tickets sold, drinks consumed or tables booked. The audience becomes a customer, and the event a product that needs to generate a return.We think there should be another way to do it.An event still costs money. Artists should be paid properly. Technical work should be valued. Equipment, spaces and the people who make an event possible have a cost, and pretending otherwise only shifts that cost onto someone else. But covering those costs is different from making profit the purpose of the event. As a non-profit association, we want to produce club nights, concerts and other cultural gatherings according to a different logic. Revenue should allow the project to exist, pay the people behind it and make the next project possible. It should not require extracting as much money as possible from the people attending. Some spaces have become so familiar as commercial spaces that we forget they can operate differently. We want to explore what happens when culture becomes the purpose again.
Interesting artists do not necessarily live a flight away. Geneva and the surrounding region already contain musicians, DJs, performers, producers, technicians and other people making work worth paying attention to. We want to begin there. Local is therefore our default, not an absolute rule. There will be moments when collaborating with an artist from elsewhere makes sense. But distance and international recognition should never be mistaken for artistic value. Before looking hundreds or thousands of kilometres away, we want to understand what is already happening around us. Working locally also changes the way an event can be made. It reduces travel, transport and accommodation. It allows relationships to continue beyond a single booking. Artists can become collaborators rather than names passing through for one night. Projects can develop through conversations, experiments and repeated encounters. It also means that more of the available resources can go towards the work itself. Supporting a local cultural scene is not only about giving local artists a stage. It is about building an environment in which artists, audiences and organisers can keep creating things together.
LOCAL BY DEFAULT
A LIGHTER STRUCTURE
We do not believe that ambitious cultural projects always require heavy structures behind them. APECIG is intentionally light. We want to keep fixed costs low, avoid unnecessary layers of organisation and build teams according to what each project actually requires. We want to reuse equipment, knowledge and resources when it makes sense, collaborate rather than duplicate, and remain small enough to make decisions without turning every idea into a long administrative process.This is not about doing everything ourselves, and it is not about replacing professional work with free labour. Light does not mean amateur.Artists should be properly remunerated. Technical work requires expertise. Safety, accessibility and working conditions cannot become optional because an organisation wants to save money. Some projects will require larger teams, specialist equipment or expensive spaces, and when they do, those resources should be there. The difference is that we do not want complexity to exist for its own sake. Every franc spent on something unnecessary is a franc that cannot be spent on an artist, a sound system, an accessible ticket, a better space or the next project. We want the structure to serve the event, never the other way around.
Everything above leads back to a simple idea. Doing more with less does not mean making smaller things. It means understanding what makes something valuable before deciding what it needs.Sometimes the answer will be a large room, an ambitious technical installation and a substantial budget. Sometimes it will be four good speakers, a floor and the right people. What matters is the experience that remains. We want to make cultural moments that feel intense, relevant and worth leaving home for. We want artists to feel that their work has been understood rather than simply programmed. We want audiences to encounter culture without unnecessary financial or social barriers. We want to strengthen what already exists around us instead of constantly looking elsewhere. And we want to remain flexible enough to keep questioning how all of this can be done better. There are many ways to produce culture.This is ours.