Félix Côte

Installation

In the living room, there’s a wooden chair resting on worn stoneware tiles. Over the years, each of its movements has produced a regular squeak which has become imprinted in the memory of the place. If you had to remember just one sound to evoke the house, now up for sale, it would surely be this one. In the manner of Eugène Ionesco’s *The King Dies –*a play in which a monarch, surrounded by his court, learns one morning of his imminent demise – the installation anticipates the disappearance of this inanimate but expressive member of the household. Here, the chair reinterprets the movements it has experienced and continues to make itself heard.

Félix Côte

Born in France in 1993, Félix Côte appropriates digital and new technologies in order to put them to critical use. With a hybrid background in art and science, he creates installations that confront the public with their own use of the Internet and online platforms. He explores the endangered areas of digital capitalism to find out what machines do rarely, or badly, or not at all. His work questions the future of the archive in an era of widespread use of media and tools marked by their fragility. By hijacking them, he seeks to produce forms that resist current patterns of obsolescence. In 2024, at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains, he made *Delete Forever,* his first short film, which explores voluntary withdrawal from social media. The film is made up of hundreds of amateur videos deleted from YouTube by those who had uploaded them. In 2025, he designed an installation that produced an acoustic archive of his childhood home based on a familiar sound: the creaking of a wooden chair on the tiles of the living room floor.

Production

Credits