Alexandra Weisbeck

Entering Alexandra Weisbeck’s universe means accepting the loss of one’s bearings and sometimes rediscovering others long thought buried. This builder of singular worlds works through accumulation and confrontation; it is through the displacement that places two dissimilar things side by side that a new vision emerges. Scales are disrupted, temporalities reversed, species crossed and uncrossed. In her studio part cabinet of curiosities, part clinic for wounded objects one is moved by this incongruous and touching little community watching you, by these patched-up survivors, the arm of one often replacing the wing of another. Alexandra collects, piles up, repairs, recycles, reinvents, moving from miniature models one would love to curl up inside to extreme-scale scenographic spaces in which one can surrender oneself. She constructs her stagings with rare dexterity and inventiveness, handling a power drill like a Chinese brush and a colossal partition wall like a notebook page. One thinks of Lévi-Strauss’s bricoleur, capable of carrying out a great number of diverse tasks and whose challenge is to transcend circumstance with the “means at hand.” And since, for her, the world would be inconceivable without the music that runs through her veins, she mixes with that same invigorating sense of crossbreeding that she applies to everything. Deeply involved in the local associative network, she is a hyperactive volunteer within Art et la Matière (a platform for collecting and reselling materials for creative use) and president of the lively association Microsiphon, a concert hub and showcase for micro-publishing.

Career