While studying architecture in Toulouse, Benjamin Coustès – founder of the Littoral agency created in Bordeaux in 2019 – let his gaze ”glide over the city, its walls and its signs to photograph what overflowed from the frame”. For the exhibition Nouvelles saisons, self-portraits of a territory, the exploration of relationships between city and photography takes a new turn. The architect decided to paste images from inside one of his projects in the Bordeaux metropolitan area to display them in the street. This idea took the form of ten posters, each printed in 20 copies. The first five are photographs of an échoppe densified from the inside. The other five bear words “chosen for their strength and precision: economies, generosity, heritage, resources, know-how”, which the architect considers to be themes that reflect his work.
The renovation of the Fieffé house (2023), carried out with limited resources, doubles the initial living space by taking advantage of the existing volume. The dark, partitioned échoppe became a through, fluid and bright dwelling, without any extension or heightening. The project involved stripping out the interior, creating a mezzanine and opening up a light well to bring light into the basement. The staircase, offset from the façade, structures the space and asserts its presence. Simple, robust and inexpensive materials reveal the original structure. For Benjamin Coustès, “inventive renovation can respond to contemporary densification challenges while respecting the original structure. The economic interpretation of the existing building then becomes a resource.”
During 2025, the architect selected the cycle routes he would use to display his work on some 147 billboards across the city. This series of collages is displayed on vertical A0 galvanized steel panels, often arranged in pairs. Their locations reveal the heterogeneity of the city: a bus shelter, a bakery façade, a ZAC (Zone d'Aménagement Concerté, joint development zone), a housing estate. Having prepared his interventions on plan, the architect then activates the vertical surfaces of the billboards through a random dialogue between words and images. Most of the time, he sticks them up in silence, alone. Sometimes passers-by stop and ask questions: is it a house? Is it legal? This display could be considered a slight departure from the ban on architects advertising. Above all, these collages question the role of the project in the city, as it is inhabited and experienced. Their presence is ephemeral, lasting at most a day. They are quickly covered up by professional advertising displays, at a frenetic pace.
“The photography – direct, simple, captured on an iPhone – is therefore the only way to preserve a trace of this action, assumed to be fleeting and contextual. It is a way of archiving, on the margins, what the city does not retain”, explains the architect. These “images of images” are then installed in the main gallery of arc en rêve. A double metal support, the only one that will not be erased, concludes the series. "What was outside comes back inside, the temporary becomes a trace, and the initial game turns into a project." For Benjamin Coustès, his action is a manifesto that resists the disappearance of the common. The simple gestures of displaying, photographing and making visible reclaim the city, outside the commercial criteria and assertions of the institutions that define what matters or has value. Displaying the marginal, the domestic and the ephemeral opens up the field of definition of the visible, the possible and the common.
