ALEXANDRA LEYKAUF 1.
Alexandra Leykauf in Conversation with Kathleen Rahn, edited excerpt from “Château de Bagatelle”. Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Gallery Martin van Zomeren, Amsterdam, Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg, 2010
Kathleen Rahn: You use found photographs for your films, collages, and installations, which you then either copy or photograph and then rearrange. How do you actually go about finding the images you use? Alexandra Leykauf: I spent a great deal of time in libraries and archives. I start with a vague idea, browse through the books, come across something here or there which then absorbs me. It’s not necessarily the best books on a subject that are of interest to me. Often enough it’s the superficial images or details not directly associated with the essentials in question. Whilst browsing, I’ll come across an image that catches my eye and draws me to it without my knowing why. Months later, I’ll remember it and then it turns out that the image fits perfectly into a collage or becomes the starting point for a whole series. It has something to do with intuition as well. My intuition is definitely better than my planning and my powers of imagination. Searching and finding are two entirely
different categories. Sometimes I am looking for a particular motif and am disappointed when I find it, but whilst searching, I’ll maybe come across an image that will find a use at a later date in another work. (…) KR: Another important thematic area, which crops up in your work is the theatre—the stage and the auditorium as spaces. You have compiled information in your research about several theatre fires, which you have used in different versions. Somehow, the narrated story burns down, that is to say, disintegrates into ashes. What is noticeable is that you have chosen photographs that show the totality of scene from the relatively objective, reasonably unemotional point of view of the observer. The ruin that emerges from the devastation is placed centrestage rather than the activities of those fighting the fire and, indeed, the catastrophe itself. AL: In reality, a theatre fire is most definitely a terrible thing in itself. However in art, it facilitates perhaps precisely those hopes and utopian projections you are talking about. There is a spark, which ignites the matter in the true sense of the word, and the viewer’s physical here and now or present, emerges from the representation in the moment of destruction. The images are, on the one hand, a documentation of a catastrophe, which occurred
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