Flowers may serve as a catalyst, a marker, and sometimes even a pacifier of human relationships; they also function as carriers for the expression of affection or compassion. The history of their trade, however, is closely entwined with that of lopsided economics and exploitation. The ambivalent status of flowers as both common objects and metaphors for globalized trade, propelled by desire and trauma, is at the center of Éric Baudelaire’s recent solo exhibition Death Passed My Way and Stuck This Flower in My Mouth at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen (2021).
Upon entering, we find ourselves amid an immersive five-channel video installation, This Flower in My Mouth (2021). The cinematic work was developed over the past three years and is for the most part set in Europe’s largest refrigerator—a climate-controlled building in Aalsmeer, the Netherlands, where forty-six million flowers, most of them flown in from Africa and South America, are sold by auction every day. Baudelaire captures the sophisticated yet equally discomfiting industrial methods employed at the Dutch flower exchange: across five large projections unfold scenes of flowers being organized, inspected, sold, and transported by workers wearing flashy safety vests. It is an endlessly hypnotizing, even seductive, loop of highly streamlined working routines.
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Full review online: www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/eric-baudelaire-gloria-hasnay-death-passed-my-way-and-stuck-this-flower-in-my-mouth-kunst-halle-sankt-gallen-2021/