Flowers of Evil

Ever since I was a child, I have been deeply fascinated by flowers, by the infinite diversity of their colors, shapes, and textures. This fascination gradually led me to wonder about their origins. In 2022, I decided to travel to Colombia, the world's second-largest exporter of cut flowers, to visit flower farms in Bogotá and Medellín.

While visiting the intensive cut-flower farms, I first became aware of the workers' relentless labor, their repetitive motions, and the traces left by chemicals on their bodies and the landscapes. But as this photographic project unfolded, I also discovered what I wasn't supposed to see: more hidden spaces, where flowers are artificially transformed. In these almost clandestine painting laboratories, some flowers are artificially colored by spraying, while others are dehydrated before their stems are dipped in artificial pigments that slowly rise up to the petals. This unsettling reality then shifts my perspective: behind the apparent beauty of the flowers lies a process of artificialization, correction, and alteration of living things.

I then sought to explore this tension between fascination and alteration. With 'Flowers of Evil', I aim to examine what appears in the image and what remains off-screen. What does a flower still convey when it becomes the product of industrial transformation? What do these artificial, surreal colors say about our contemporary relationship with the living world? And how can one photograph a violence that often remains invisible, silent, almost dissolved in the very beauty of the images?

The series blends documentary photography, staged portraits, studio images, and photographic negatives. This multifaceted visual language captures the complexity of the subject, oscillating between testimony, staging, and revelation. The studio images isolate flowers, technical objects, and portraits of women as fragments of the same industry. They shift the living toward a more objectified form, where beauty engages in a dialogue with the tools of its alteration. The negatives, for their part, shift the flowers toward a cold, almost clinical aesthetic, akin to scientific or medical imagery.

'Flowers of Evil', explores what lies beneath floral beauty: a silent, toxic narrative in which transformed life reveals the invisible violence inherent in our relationship with the world.