Paris in Practice: Juan Matos on His Time at Cité Internationale des Arts
Still from The World is Not Our Home, Juan Luis Matos. 2025.
This summer, Bakehouse artist Juan Matos spent two months in residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, immersing himself in a vibrant international creative community. The experience offered him a rare stretch of time to focus entirely on his own ideas and production— an opportunity to explore collaboration, world-building, and the role of storytelling across mediums.
From late-night conversations with artists from across the globe to long studio days developing a new film project, Juan shares how the residency shifted his perspective and unlocked a new rhythm of making.
I am a chronic "under-preparer". It is my way of navigating anxiety and feelings of overwhelm so I don't psych myself out. My therapist might call it self-sabotage, but I see it for its positive elements at times. I didn't have high expectations of my residency at Cité Internionale des Arts because in reality, I didn't think about it much. I started packing a couple days before the flight and had to repack the night before because of course, I was way over the weight limit. I arrived with a project in mind that I really wasn't sure how I would go about. It required collaboration, dialogue, and relationship building. All of which gave me deeper anxiety, but I figured, when in Paris...
I arrived Monday morning, and by Wednesday, I had met my collaborator. He didn't know it at the time, but we would become good friends and embark on a month-long video journey. That Wednesday, like every Wednesday before and after that, the 200+ residents would wander the campus walking from floor to floor, studio to studio, drinking boxed wine and carrying their glasses from their kitchens with them. I quietly followed the sound of chattered cacophony which led me to the open studios. My first 2 friends were a Chilean playwright and a Sudanese filmmaker who had been there for many months already. After getting lost in the contained yet maze-like campus, I found my next group of friends. 3 Swiss performers speaking German in the cramped hallway who had also just arrived. After 2 glasses of wine, my anxiety was slowly melting off of me, and I spoke to them in my broken German, to which they responded fluently, and I was caught - my German had its limits and it was at Hello, do you speak German?
We walked into the even more cramped live/work space. It was an open studio like I’ve never seen before. A fully furnished studio apartment with work on every corner, chair, bed, and wall. If you turned your living room into your studio, and then had a gallery opening, this is what it might look like. A young woman served small plates of food, and I cowered by the window where French speakers smoked rolled cigarettes and played with a small dog. Quickly, I noticed the artist, Saad Eltinay, holding various bouquets of flowers and explaining with fervor the importance of this day, the 2 year anniversary of his release from prison by the RSF Militia in Sudan. He finished the sentence with a smile on his face. It was here that I knew whatever I was doing in Paris would be centered around him.
I spent my first month in Paris mostly in the studio writing and conceptualizing the works for the gallery shows at David Castillo and Tunnel Projects (both now on view), and I started filming the historical segments of the film that I would make with Saad. I was still figuring it all out when I also started making videos for Instagram, a rash response to my introspection on the impact of art in a world of genocide, mass displacement and indifference. Maybe Instagram, or Tiktok, was the answer to feeling that a message could get across in the work. I used that medium to get me out of the studio and into the cityvisiting museums, galleries, concerts and friends, planting messaging in between travel content. It got me thinking about the power of the narrator and the ability to create misinformation, or as I prefer to call it: mythmaking. This idea would become a foundational element of the film The World is Not Our Home as I learned more about the inception of anthropological and documentary filmmaking in Paris and its utilization as a tool for mystifying and othering the “savage”- thereby justifying colonization, eugenics and racism through the work of Felix Regnault and those who would follow his tradition. Content creation started to feel like world building in a way that gave a level of accessibility and efficiency that I struggled with in traditional filmmaking. I was making a 3 minute film every week or so and it shifted the preciousness I felt when it came to making video work.
Ultimately, Paris - and the Cité Residency to be exact, unlocked a level of production and openness that I typically used to making money as a freelance filmmaker. In Miami, I’m very productive and filming or editing a lot, but most of it isn’t for me. In Paris, I was able to concentrate every moment on developing an idea or producing one. The discipline and focus is something I’ve craved for years, and didn’t realize how addictive it would be. I found myself in holes researching, pulling threads, going on tangents that didn’t make sense at the time, and found myself on the other side hours later, hungry and exhausted, with a deep sense of fulfillment.
On top of that, my world view completely expanded. I met artists from Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Chile, Switzerland, Egypt, Haiti, Serbia, and far beyond. The conversations between artists in Paris felt huge in comparison to my small island of Miami. I was in dialogue with novelists, composers, dancers, visual artists and filmmakers, musicians and everything in between. It made me reflect on the value of moving beyond the sometimes insular world of filmmaking or visual arts that I participate in in Miami and exploring more intentional conversation with people that are in other practices.
— Juan Luis Matos, 2025.