Meet Eric Baudelaire
The day after the screening of his latest feature film, Une fleur à la bouche, Eric Baudelaire presents his work and more specifically his audiovisual production in the “petite salle” of the Institut audiovisuel de Monaco.
Born in Salt Lake City [1973], trained in the social sciences at Brown University (Providence), then at King’s College (London), Éric Baudelaire is a visual artist and filmmaker, developing a body of work of great political and formal radicalism. His main figurative project concerns the accursed, in the sense of the forgotten, pariahs, defeated, extremists, beings excluded from the general economy (world economy, psychic economy). A series of pieces deals with geopolitical cursed: the unrecognized states of the Caucasus, in particular Abkhazia. It combines a book, États imaginés (2005), a film, Letter to Max (2014), and an exhibition, The Secession Sessions(2015): all of which allow us to reflect on the notions of statelessness, nationalism and independence. Another case engages the cursed of history, starting with filmmaker and activist Masao Adachi, whose work has never ceased to measure up to injustice and the indefensible, imprisoned for almost three decades. Baudelaire transposes the initiatives taken by Adachi’s masterpiece A.K.A. Serial Killer (1969) – telling the story of a young murderer without words and without showing him, exclusively through the landscapes he has traveled – to his film Also Known As Jihadi (2017). The description of the territories crossed by an Islamist who left to fight in Syria is combined with the documents collected on him by the police, to question the very principle of political action. Infigurable and a blind spot, the cursed becomes a revelation. Be what you want to be: to consider a subject requires us to renew the forms of work under the auspices of cooperation. Baudelaire’s documentary on Adachi, L’Anabase de May et Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi et 27 années sans images (2011), is followed by a fiction film made with Adachi, The Ugly One (2013). The political imperative to turn motifs into co-creators culminates in Un film dramatique (2019), which describes the making of a film with schoolchildren in Saint-Denis, earning the entire co-signing team the Prix Marcel Duchamp. Une fleur à la bouche (2021) opens onto another experience of limits: confronting the inconceivable of death.
Nicole Brenez
Petite salle de l’Institut audiovisuel de Monaco
83-85 Boulevard du Jardin Exotique, Monaco
