Artists in residence

Playwright, poet and director, Kouam Tawa was born in 1974 in western Cameroon. He resides in his hometown and devotes himself to literature, theater and the animation of writing workshops. He has conducted writing and drama workshops in a dozen countries in the French-speaking world and has published some thirty books, most of them for young people.

He won the first ACCT prize for African literature for young people, the poetry prize of the Lire et faire lire readers, and was the recipient of writing grants from the Association Beaumarchais, the Centre National du Livre, the AFAA-Beaumarchais “En quête d’auteurs” program, the DMDTS, the CulturesFrance “Visa pour la création” program, ARTCENA, and the Institut Français “Des mots à la scène” program.

He has been in residency at the Maison des auteurs·trices des Francophonies – Des écritures à la scène in Limoges, at the Triangle – cité de la danse de Rennes, at the Résidence d’auteurs dramatiques francophones en Valais, at the Résidence 10 sur 10 de Brunow, at the 104 (Cent Quatre), at the Récollets, at the Villa Bloch de Poitiers, at the Collectif 12 à Mantes la Jolie and many times at the Cité internationale des arts.

Kra Kouassi trained in documentary filmmaking at the ateliers Varan with sound engineer and sound director Daniel Deshays and sound engineer Michel Creïs, who was part of the radio creation workshop, ACR at France Culture. She took part in a workshop with the theorist and playwright Jean-Pierre Sarrazac and has benefited from the support of filmmaker Claudio Pazienza.

In her practice, she is in search of intimate experiences of knowledge in situations of conflict. Repetition, immobility, presence, and the very misery of the ordinary are the material in which she supports this quest. She tries to make sense of the real by shaping it mainly from individual powerlessness and its effort to strive towards a collective being.

Her project Le Baobab des Grands Fonds aims to experience the life of Africa in the Guadeloupean and Caribbean imaginary, based on the exuberance of the discourse of a major Baobab tree roaming the agricultural hinterland of Guadeloupe. The speeches of the Baobab tree, the sound of the Creole language of Guadeloupe, the soul of bodies descended from freedmen and freedwomen, and the silence of an ineffable fortune, such are the four elements of the sound material that Kra Kouassi will explore during her residency at the Cité internationale des arts, in order to search for and experiment with appropriate staging and setting.

Sofia Kouloukouri is a visual artist, performer and writer based in Athens. Through endurance and narration, her work deals with literal and affective weights as a feminine heritage originating in the fundamental education of girls, myth and religious doctrines. As a form of resistance, in her work female bodies strive to become forces of nature, measuring themselves to the landscape, synchronizing to the elements or, in a transe of fury, transforming their cinetic energy into electricity. Within a feminist ecology, Kouloukouri explores what it means to be solid as a girl and woman today.

Sofia Kouloukouri holds masters degrees in cinema studies (Auth, GR), visual arts (Edhea, CH), and art history (UNIGE, CH). Her academic research revolves around female artists and sex work. Her writing has been published by Nero Editions, Miami books and The Art Newspaper. Her first book Artistes Femmes et Travail du Sexe was published by Editions L’Harmattan in 2025. She is curating, with Alexios Seilopoulos, the itinerant film festival Pleasure&Disobedience. Kouloukouri’s work has been featured amongst others at: Roman road London, Halle Nord Geneve, Le Grütli Genève, MACBA Buenos Aires, MCBA Lausanne, MIR festival, Kunsthal Charlottenborg Copenhagen, Phenomenon Studios Reykjavik, Roma Diffusa, ArtAthina, Museo Nacional y Centro de Investigaction de Altamira.