Artists in residence

Maxine Weiss’s (Germany, 1992) artistic practice, which encompasses sculptures, installations, research, and videos, pursues a material-based approach where all components coexist in a mutual and non-hierarchical relationship. With this coexistential approach, she aims to dissolve the dualistic distinction between nature and culture through material and media connections.

Maxine Weiss graduated in 2024 with honors at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich with Professor Alexandra Bircken and Professor Raphaela Vogel and was awarded the Debutant prize. In 2021/2022 she studied at the Beaux-Arts de Marseille. Before that, she studied art history and cultural anthropology in Munich, Freiburg, Paris and Vienna. 

Stephan Weitzel is a German and French speaking author. He studied theater at the University of Paris III and then moved to London and Norwich to study at art schools.

After a first professional career in the visual arts for twenty-five years, he now devotes himself to writing. In his writings, he tries to study the solitude of contemporary man and to reveal the traces left by historical processes in individuals and societies.

Living in Germany, he published in 2021 a long story about his home town, Leipzig, as well as an essay on allotments in Les Cahiers de l’École de Blois. In the same year, he wrote a short story about an incongruous chapter in Franco-German history: the forced exile of the Vichy government at Sigmaringen Castle in 1944/45.

He is currently working on his second novel in German. His residency at the Cité internationale des arts is an opportunity for him to devote himself to the writing of his new book in French, a portrait of the urban society of Greater Paris.

Sebastian Wells is a photographer from Berlin. He has been a member of the Berlin-based photographer’s collective OSTKREUZ since 2019 and works on documentary and artistic projects.

Since 2016 he has been photographing at Olympic Games all over the world, trying to deconstruct the spectacular sports stages with images. In 2022, he co-founded the Ukrainian-German indie magazine “Soлomiya” together with the Ukrainian photographer Vsevolod Kazarin as a reaction to the Russian full-scale invasion and deals with the question of how art can contribute to resistance.

In other projects, such as “La Rada di Augusta” (2019-2020), he accompanied the everyday life of the residents of an oil refinery in Sicily over 2 years, examined the growing nationalism and separatist movements in Flanders (“Typ/Traube/Tross”, 2021-2023) or embarked on a visual journey through the make-shift world of refugee camps in the orbit of the European foreign policies (“Utopia”, 2017-2018).