Basing his work on exacting investigations of places, Cyrille Weiner constantly interrogates the appropriation of space, especially its fringes and sites of transformation. Obstinately asking himself how individuals are able to take over the spaces where they live, at a distance from directives from on high, little by little the artist leaves the documentary mode to offer a world full of staged fictions, through exhibitions, publishing projects and installations. He also re-contextualizes images, using them from one series to another to make up artist books, like Le Ban des utopies, a kind of moleskine diary; his installation in Art and photography centre of Lectoure, a reading room situated in a pigeon cage; and his “setting into motion” of anonymous people, producing a kind of nomadism Weiner is fond of. In spaces that seem as porous and intermediary as a construction site – Avenue Jenny and La Fabrique du pré in Nanterre; Les longs murs in Marseille; En dehors du plan in Brasilia; Presque île at the villa Noailles in Hyères, etc., the relationship between the body and spaces changes along with the changing gaze.

Deliberately associating himself with the community of architects, city planners and landscapers, and here teaming up with designer Grégory Lacoua, he invents hybrid photographic objects, a mash-up of sculpture and furniture that encourage us to in in an unusual way. The body and its movements are part of the artwork. This effect is all the stronger in a piece where three photos were transferred onto glass plates. When superposed, they bring into view a floating landscape in a way reminiscent of old stereoscopes. Mixing successive strates of nature, city and seashore, thus concentrating his theoretical and visual message, Cyrille Weiner creates a heterotopia before our decoding eyes.