Charles Baudelaire

For Charles Baudelaire, the photographic medium is not an art but a technical means of representing reality. As a counterpoint to Baudelaire, Antoine d’Agata reworks his own photographs through digital intervention to return to engraving, as if to go from the pixel to the line of the time. He pushes photography to its limits, discarding the medium to return to the raw. Baudelaire’s texts thus enter into dialogue with photographs that have become engravings through wear and tear and manipulation, where the bodies blend together to give way to the poetry of the body.

The work is based on the original uncensored edition of Baudelaire’s collection accompanied by these engraved prints by d’Agata. Present and past are superimposed. Like a game of transparency that will present the frame of an image on the cover. In this work Fleurs du Mal, Baudelaire is a stroller, a spectator of the world around him, of urban transformations, while d’Agata embodies photography, life and reappropriates the space of the city by the gesture.

Two personalities meet on the occasion of the 200 years of the birth of Charles Baudelaire. Two artists who could have meet each other, debated, confronted each other. For d’Agata, Baudelaire leaves a legacy that must be pushed to extend its own reflection.
The artist intervenes on the edge of Baudelaire’s poems with personal reflections and quotations from his favorite thinkers, descendants of Baudelaire’s thought: Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord or Georges Bataille.

Affixed vertically to the poems, these handwritten interventions assert themselves while leaving the original text its own space. A second sense of reading is thus offered to the reader between Baudelaire’s text and the interpretation given by d’Agata through the words as much as through the engravings.

The fourth book in the annual series A Series of Open Questions published by CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and Sternberg Press is informed by themes found in the work of Lorraine O'Grady, including diaspora, Black female subjectivity, racial hybridity, translation, intersectional feminism, institutional critique, Black representation in the art world, archives, music, Conceptualism, and performance art.

The Wattis Institute's annual reader, A Series of Open Questions, provides an edited selection of perspectives, images, and references related to the Wattis's year-long "On our mind" research seasons. Each volume includes newly commissioned writing by members of the research season's core reading group, as well as text and visual contributions by a diverse range of other artists and writers. The title of each reader takes the form of a question and becomes, as new books are published, a gradually evolving series of open questions.

Contributions by The Allman Brothers Band, Charles Baudelaire, Selam Bekele, Martin Bernal, Linda Goode Bryant and Rujeko Hockley, Camille Chedda, Gabrielle Civil, Kathleen Collins, Erica Deeman, Jeanne Finley & John Muse, Jacqueline Francis, Edouard Glissant, E. Jane, Bec Imrich, Charles Lee, Darrell M. McNeil, Denise Murrell, Sawako Nakayasu, Lorraine O'Grady, Yétúndé Olagbaju, Hsu Peng & Allison Yasukawa, Lara Putnam, Trina Michelle Robinson, Legacy Russell, David Scott, Peter Simensky, Carrie Mae Weems, Judith Wilson, Alisha Wormsley.

One morning, Hazel Brown awakes in a badly decorated hotel room to find that she's written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. In her bemusement the hotel becomes every cheap room she ever stayed in during her youthful perambulations in 1980s Paris ... This is the legend of a she-dandy's life. Part magical realism, part feminist ars poetica, part history of tailoring, part bibliophilic anthem, part love affair with nineteenth-century painting, The Baudelaire Fractal is poet and art writer Lisa Robertson's first novel.

'As far as I'm concerned, it's already a classic.' - Anne Boyer