Les Fleurs du mal

What happens when nature is no longer enough? Through Colombia’s flower industry, Les Fleurs du mal explores the hidden human cost of beauty and our insatiable desire to alter what is already beautiful.

Les Fleurs du mal*

Since childhood, flowers have held a special place in my imagination. I have always been moved by their fragile beauty, by the life they embody, their fleeting nature, and their quiet presence.

In 2022 and again in 2025, while working in the vast flower farms of Bogotá and Medellín, Colombia, I discovered another reality beneath this familiar beauty. My attention was first drawn to the women workers, their repetitive gestures, the traces left by chemicals on bodies and landscapes. Gradually, my gaze shifted towards more hidden spaces, where the flowers themselves were subjected to artificial transformations.

Some are sprayed with paint. Others are dehydrated, their stems immersed for hours in artificial pigments that slowly rise towards the petals. Their almost unreal colors bear the marks of human intervention.

Confronted with these altered flowers, what unsettles me is not so much their strangeness as the desire to transform what nature produces on its own. As though its beauty were no longer enough, as though our insatiable desire for novelty compelled us to push the boundaries of life ever further.

Inside the greenhouses, the women and men who cultivate these flowers are exposed to chemicals on a daily basis. Yet for many, this industry offers one of the few opportunities for economic stability. A contradiction that runs through my work, between the vulnerability of human bodies and the demands of ever-intensifying production.

I explore this tension between fascination and alteration through a visual language combining documentary photography, staged portraits, still lifes, and digital negatives. Together, these approaches create a world in which the beauty of flowers confronts an almost clinical aesthetic, suspended between their original appearance and the traces of their transformation.

With Les Fleurs du mal, the wonder of childhood gives way to a questioning of our relationship with nature. Beneath the beauty of flowers lies a story of domination and alteration, in which living matter becomes something to be shaped, corrected, and reinvented.

*Title borrowed from Charles Baudelaire's poetry collection (1857).