Luigi Pirandello’s one-act play, The Man with a Flower in His Mouth (L’uomo dal fiore in bocca), follows a night-time conversation between two nameless characters. One bears on his lip a tumour with an oddly floral appellation. The other, a stranded traveller, waits to take the early morning train home. The enigmatic repartee of the man with the flower in his mouth reveals Death’s inexorable countdown at work, and the man’s desire to absorb a world that is slipping away.
Pirandello’s parable is the starting point for Éric Baudelaire’s five-channel video installation, Death Passed My Way and Stuck This Flower in My Mouth. The work is set in the gigantic flower warehouse in Aalsmeer, Netherlands, where millions of flowers arrive from Africa and South America and are evaluated for sale at auction, then dispatched around the world. Traversing this vast facility, Baudelaire’s camera takes in flowers, faces, then machines. Like an assemblage coming together, all the parts join in a crescendo of semi-automatic operations. The computerised economy that Baudelaire’s film investigation documents is an entirely disembodied, de-territorialised interface. And yet what shines through is the persistent human yearning for the real – evidenced in his gentle portrayal of the warehouse workers, in their absorbed composure as they work their way through their meticulous tasks.
—Marcella Lista
