Félix Côte

Film

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Every day, thousands of people choose to remove their content from social media. YouTube, in particular, is home to a large number of ephemeral amateur videos in which people express themselves about their daily lives. Although soon deleted, these clips do present a sincere landscape of our connected societies. 

In the manner of a genizah, a place of temporary conservation of sacred documents in Judaism, Delete Foreverproposes a way of safeguarding these personal videos. In a derelict space, printers carry out the ritual preservation of these media on paper, giving them material form for the first time. Given the loss of control over our personal data online, network-quitters may have found a solution.

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.

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