Trampoline supports artist Éric Baudelaire’s participation in the 61th Venice Biennale, with the work Death Passed My Way and Stuck This Flower in my Mouth, presented at the Arsenale.
The core of the installation is a five-channel film set in a vast refrigerated building in the Netherlands, where forty-six million flowers—flown in from farms in Africa and South America—are sold at auction every morning.
This process is captured in a hypnotic form of visual anthropology that is at once seductive, because flowers are beautiful, and terrifying, because the scale of this globalized trade is ecologically troubling. The documentary sequences are framed by the presence of a fictional observer who roams the streets at night, inspired by a character from Luigi Pirandello’s short play L’Uomo dal Fiore in Bocca [The Man with a Flower in His Mouth]. The flower, which also gives the installation its title, refers to an epithelioma—a tumour that was incurable at the time Pirandello wrote the play. The protagonist, sensing death upon him, projects himself into the minute details of the world he observes intensely, as a way of escaping his impending fate.
