Sebastian Wells: Arena, Take 2

Arena, Take 2: A Post Heroic Theater follows Arena, Take 1: Facing the Spectacle, Wells's critical examination of mass spectacle at the Olympic Games. Between March and October 2024, he documented the Place de la Concorde, the largest square in Paris, before, during, and after its conversion into a temporary Olympic stadium park for urban sports such as skateboarding and BMX. In the shadow of the obelisk, Wells invites us to join a seemingly preposterous experiment as a productive provocation, which is, in fact, quite spectacular in itself: to look at the Olympic Games as one would observe an ordinary street intersection, and in doing so, dissolve the extraordinary into the continuous heartbeat of the metropolis. His project celebrates the ordinary as much as the slow, unglamorous passage of time, offering an antidote to the hyper-mediated spectacle of the Games. Sebastian Wells, (b. 1996 in Königs Wusterhausen) is a Berlin-based photographer, a member of the OSTKREUZ agency, and co-founder of Solomiya magazine.