Hillel, born in 1996 in Tel Aviv, had come to Paris when he was a child as his family is very attached to the city (his grandfather attended the Beaux-Arts courses and his mother assisted Claude Lanzmann on the edit of the movie Shoah).
Maïa, born in 1989 in Paris, never thought she would one day set foot in Israel mostly because of political and ethical reasons as the Palestinian territories kept being occupied by Israel, but also because of many fears and prejudices. It has been three years that the couple lives between Europe and the Middle East. Maïa is often “misconsidered” as an Israeli whereas Hillel is often regarded as a Scandinavian-looking tourist. Such misconceptions contributed to the way they photograph each other and their way of playing with the notions of foreignness and identity everywhere they go, using their ambivalent façades as an asset to approach all types of people and situations with their cameras in hands. While building up their relationship, they began to unveil and to understand some recurrent patterns inherent to both their families throughout History. Such as identity which cannot be monolithic as it may undergo many subtle changes in a lifetime, or immigration, travelling and art, the means to express oneself, to take a critical stance on the world, to look for new horizons and, above all, to fight self-centered conformism. Maïa and Hillel became an artistic duo, Maïell. Since then, they have insisted not to reveal which of the two is taking a picture so as to blur the lines of gender, nationality and age.
They have found, through their common visual language, a way to nourish each other and thus to become less foreign.