Artists in residence

INTERVIEW

An anecdote about your residency at the Cité internationale des arts, specific to the Montmartre site?

“Living and working on the Montmartre site of the Cité internationale des arts is an extraordinary experience for me. I create immersive environments and am extremely sensitive to the atmospheres of the places. 

Here, there is a great effect of nature on the senses: the plants, the birds, the daily presence of light, give me the impression of living in a romantic landscape of the beginning of the century. This stimulates the imagination and helps to find a state of correctness, essential to any creative process, I believe.”

From the project you presented at the Piscine Rouvet for Nuit Blanche 2018 to the Bordeaux Submarine Base where you are currently exhibiting, how the residence at the Cité has helped you build your projects?

“The residency at the Cité internationale des arts was a real springboard that allowed me to set up projects that were decisive for me: Nuit Blanche 2018, as well as a project at the Bordeaux Submarine Base that I am currently running. 

The studio I am fortunate enough to occupy is spacious and absolutely adapted to my research that crosses light, displacement, theatricality. 

This studio was a real laboratory of practices and a space for meetings and exchanges. It allowed me to cross my reflection with the perspective of other creators, such as the dancer and choreographer Calixto Netto with whom we collaborated during the Nuit Blanche. 

Today, the Cité gives me the opportunity to develop my next film under ideal conditions, which will be shot at the Bordeaux Submarine Base in 2019.”

BIOGRAPHY

Visual artist and videographer, Eva Medin develops a fictional universe imbued with a critical and offbeat look at her environment. First trained at the Beaux-Arts de Monaco, she developed through drawing a writing of situations and spaces that she quickly moved into the choreographic field. Exploring questions related to posture, she wrote the scenographies for two contemporary ballets, then continued her studies at the Arts décoratifs de Paris, where she appropriated the videographic space and enriched her language with new experiments related to framing, sound and light. 

At the crossroads of disciplines, Eva Medin takes over the spaces where she works. It deploys immersive paths and environments that it conceives both as a support for experience and projection. His works are elaborated and presented as atmospheric environments, mental landscapes. Thought in terms of groups, they are made up of fragments, which, when assembled and reactivated, become narrative clutches. 

Using a grammar of cinema, a vocabulary of the cliché, the vignette or the cartoon, she builds worrying and familiar inter worlds, through intuitively recognizable images, whose manufacturing conditions she plays at revealing. 

Convoking memories and observations from both staff and the collective imagination, she approaches the themes of the group, loss and nostalgia in a detour. Drawing on a minimal formal vocabulary, it is part of a broader network of references ranging from Jacques Tati to Pierre Ardouvin, Ann Veronica Jensen to Philippe Quesne. 

She has developed her professional experience with directors, choreographers and artists such as Jean-Christophe Maillot, Macha Makeieff, Mathilde Monnier, Yvan Argotte and Camille Henrot. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Galerie Espace à Vendre in Nice, as well as at 116, centre d’art contemporain de Montreuil. As part of the Ovni festival, she was entrusted with the great hall of the former slaughterhouses of Nice where she deployed her work. 

Broadcast for the inauguration of the Georges Méliès cinema in Montreuil, for the Nuit Blanche in Paris or at the Villa Arson, her video work has been selected for various festivals in France and abroad. 

Alejandro Medina is a multidisciplinary architect and artist from Guatemala. He graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Building on his studies of architecture, photography and 3D visualization his work lies between the crossing points of different mediums.

Intrinsic in his work is a sense of curiosity for ones surroundings; as well as a desire to unveil the unexpected interconnections occurring within specific ecosystems and ultimately life. Alejandro Medina’s most recent work delves into the inherent, yet often times complicated relationship that exists between humans, architecture and nature.

He has exhibited work in Guatemala, USA, Spain, France, China, Taiwan and New Zealand amongst others. 

French soprano born in 2001 in Saint-Omer, Eleonore Meens began singing at the CRD of her hometown before obtaining a TMD baccalaureate in Lille and studying at the CRR of Lille. She continued her training at the Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussel, then perfected her skills at the Centre d’Art Lyrique de la Méditerranée in Nice. A member of the La Monnaie / De Munt Academy since 2024, she is engaged as a soloist. Since 2025, she has been studying at the CNSMD in Paris and at the Chapelle Musicale Reine Elisabeth. Accordionist since childhood, his repertoire extends from the baroque to contemporary.

Christopher Meerdo is an artist who grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Šiauliai, Lithuania.

He has received his Master’s degree in Photography from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

He has recently exhibited at the Exgirlfriend Gallery, Berlin; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; The National Gallery of Kosovo, Pristina; and The Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh. He is also represented by DOCUMENT Gallery, Chicago.

Before his residency at the Cité internationale des arts, he has been an artist in residency at SIM Reykjavik and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Christopher Meerdo was most recently a fellow at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Netherlands. 

In conjunction with his artistic practice, he is also involved in education. He has taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 2012 to 2019, and has been recently appointed Assistant Professor of Photography and New Media at the University of North Texas.

I am interested in the ways in which human and non-human technological visual systems maintain or subvert structures of power within the context of surveillance capitalism. Using expanded-photographic methodologies of data processing, image-synthesis, computational sculpture, and moving images, my projects reference data archives as active sites that can compromise or control privacy, bear witness to injustices, or strengthen resistance.

 — Statement of Christopher Meerdo