Maxime Callen
Vous méritez La Ville Côtière

The installation and performance Vous méritez La Ville Côtière is an integral part of La Ville Côtière project.

In 2020, seeking new ways to promote lavillecotiere.fr, I first developed Le Stand de l’office de tourisme, an IRL work in the form of an installation that I submitted to several art centre directors. However, my sales skills were not enough to convince them to host my project in their spaces, which led me to rethink the project in 2023.

Recalling a delivery tricycle I saw in the aisles of the Paris International Tourism Fair, I envisaged 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 approach passers-by to extol the virtues of this libertarian utopia. With a well-rehearsed speech, I bring this alternative reality to life for the duration of a conversation. Its familiarity encourages passers-by to rethink their own reality in light of this fiction, which, over the years, has become less and less like a prediction.

This is a new work that forms part of the lore of La Ville Côtière, further developing some of its aspects. For example, I imagine a new company: Pénates, a real estate agency offering exceptional properties in La Ville Côtière. On the delivery tricycle, a competition invites interested parties to try to win a villa by filling in some information to prove their compatibility with a libertarian model. Incidentally, this is an opportunity for me to collect the participants’ contact details and sign them up to my newsletter.

Behind the eye-catching advertising object that is the delivery tricycle for La Ville Côtière lies the figure of the artist struggling to make a name for himself. With this project, I am embracing my role as a communicator, which is now inherent to the status of artist. This is a subject that I also explore in Ma vie, la vraie, a project on Instagram in which I documented the creation of the delivery tricycle and the trials and tribulations of an artist’s life in 2024.