La Ville Côtière

La Ville Côtière project is composed of five pieces: a video trailer Un endroit libre, a website lavillecotiere.fr, two installations and performances Le Stand de l’office de tourisme and Vous méritez La Ville Côtière, as well as a Kit de virtualisation.

La Ville Côtière project was born in 2013 from a formal research project. My aim was to consider the website as a medium and develop a narrative on it. Using my skills as a graphic designer, I developed a visual vocabulary composed of photomontages, images generated on mapping applications such as Google Earth, or found in royalty-free image banks.

Developing a highly commercial aesthetic, I began to explore the theme of the market economy and embarked on extensive research into libertarianism, a political philosophy that promotes an extreme vision of liberalism. After reading David Friedman’s essay Vers une société sans État, I developed the world of La Ville Côtière in greater detail, imagining, thanks to the author, what a city where everything was privatized would look like. By taking liberal logic to its extreme and confronting the characters in my story with the absurdities of this model, I wanted to question our era, its customs, and its ideals.

La Ville Côtière is thus a city/state where everything has been privatized to such an extent that governments have disappeared. No one governs the city except for two large groups that own all of the city’s companies, infrastructure, and services. Over the years, these commercial groups have shaped lifestyles based on a consumerist ideal within society. Lifestyles that encourage selfishness and isolationism.

In 2015, Un endroit libre was released, the introductory video for the La Ville Côtière project. Like an advertisement, this short video sets the tone for the expansive universe developed over the past three years.

At the same time, I focused my research on major Western cities to observe the impact of our liberal economy on individuals, which led me to study the phenomenon of sōshoku inchi (草食男子, literally “herbivorous men”), young Japanese men who are indifferent to sexual relations, a phenomenon that is of concern to the Japanese government. In La Ville Côtière, the birth rate is a cause for concern for those who govern the city because growth is at the heart of its philosophy, as emphasized by the adage “Fewer births, less growth,” which is repeated like an advertising slogan by all the brands in this fictional universe. More broadly, one of the central themes I develop in this work is the violence of the roles assigned to individuals in society according to their gender, as well as the omnipresence and commodification of sexuality despite the awakening of romantic feelings and, ultimately, reproduction.

As a result, the inhabitants of La Ville Côtière gradually sank into depression, and although some brands were able to capitalize on this phenomenon by selling remedies for sadness, this widespread depression led to a sharp decline in romantic feelings, sexuality within couples, and, as a result, the birth rate. This decline in births is a serious threat to the economic stability of La Ville Côtière, which has experienced its first population decline in history.

To curb this phenomenon, the two companies Major and ID&AL use their immense power to encourage the inhabitants of La Ville Côtière to have babies. To do so, they leverage their influence over the media, set prohibitive prices for contraceptives and abortions, award loyalty points to parents, and develop concepts that enable women to become pregnant without a partner. One example is the Fécondariums, free insemination clinics that use sperm collected at Masturbarium, a subsidiary that offers men in La Ville Côtière robotic masturbation at a reduced price.

In 2019, lavillecotiere.fr is online, accessible by typing the address into an internet browser. Visitors can then navigate the map of this universe and discover its inner workings through a narrative featuring three characters, whom they follow through videos, text messages, and their web browsing. At various points, the characters are busy reading articles on La Ville Côtière news sites, which users can also visit. Advertisements for fictional brands are also scattered throughout the city and link to the advertisers’ websites to reveal many aspects of the protagonists’ environment. This mishmash contributes to creating a non-linear reading experience that depends on the readers’ clicks, attention, and curiosity.

I like to describe lavillecotiere.fr as a multimedia novel. This project seeks to use the website as a medium in its own right and to reinvent the way stories are told and narrated, taking advantage of new digital tools to create a new and coherent reading experience.

In 2020, realizing that the online dissemination of this project had been timid, I began to imagine ways to bring this virtual object to life. This led me to first develop Le Stand de l’office de tourisme, an installation in which I would act as a salesperson seeking to make this destination attractive to the public.

But my sales skills weren’t enough to make the stand a success in an exhibition space, which led me to rethink the project in 2023. Remembering a delivery tricycle I had seen in the aisles of the Paris International Tourism Fair, I saw the possibility of converting my stand project into a mobile object. So I began working on Vous méritez La Ville Côtière, a delivery tricycle on the back of which I would meet passersby to extol the virtues of this libertarian utopia.