Cyrille Weiner is a French photographer currently based in Paris, Cyrille Weiner. He was born in 1976 and studied at the École Nationale Supérieure Louis Lumière. His main interest is in the uses and appropriation of places. His projects document the interaction between planned public space and private space. In 2005, he was commissioned by the Villa Noailles, for the exhibition Oui, avec plaisir, to photograph the performing arts venues designed by architect Patrick Bouchain, which he chose to capture occupied, inhabited and in use. The collaboration with the architect continued later in the year with Fait main and Metavilla (French pavilion, 10th Venice International Architecture Biennale, 2006).
Cyrille proposes a free interpretation of geographic, urban and social issues through an artistic practice that calls into question the fictional and poetic power of the photographic document. Today Cyrille shares his photographic series titled, From Urban to Human” with us.
From Urban to Human
This bed of greenery inspires not abandon but an awaiting. Overhanging a vast motorway junction, circled by towers, it is a vegetal stop against which the historical axe of the Parisian West comes to break. On this section of motorway returned to a state of wilderness, the stones tell no more stories. They allow the unexpected to come into being. Sensitive to the interactions of the natural and the man-made, Cyrille Weiner interprets the space in its force of both destruction and renewal: spurts of sap crack through the cement, fluid sands destroy the supporting walls, plants grip onto the motorway parapets. Everything communicates, overflows, spreading out over the infrastructures that shape the landscape to the measure of man. The wasteland, with its tangles of plants, converts the territory into a free-zone, open to a multitude of uses. As if escaped from towns in which introversion, private property and isolation triumph, a few men here seem to reconquer their own time, energy and imagination.
Cyrille Weiner observes this concrete reappropriation of the wasteland, the bodies and hands that dig, plant, weed and hence create the field. But this primary reality is filtered, transcribed into a fiction of the end-of-the-world and a paradise lost. In this wasteland of designs suspended, usual bearings of time become blurred ; these men come to resemble both the first and the last.
Marguerite Pilven, October 2012
His work has been published by several international magazines (M Le Monde, New York Time T magazine, British Journal of Photography, Foam…) and exhibited at the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon, the Rencontres d’Arles, the Villa Noailles in Hyères, the Guangdong Museum of Art in China and the Festival of Light in Buenos Aires. He received the Lucien Hervé and Rodolphe Hervé Prize in 2012.
You can view more of Cyrilles work at his website