SYNOPSIS:

Correspondances is a loose adaptation of Charles Baudelaire’s poem (Les Fleurs du mal, 1857) updated to the 21st century and immanent climate catastrophe. The piece follows the general outlines of the poem and seizes on concepts, ideas and images within it; though there are departures from the text in hommages to Baudelaire’s successors –especially Rimbaud, Mallarmé and Apollinaire. 

Baudelaire had no knowledge of the climate apocalypse, but he did document humanities oscillations between the world of nature and artificial paradises (narcotics); and an Edenic childhood full of the natural world, with the modern depravity of the city. 

The correspondences here are the natural world and the simulated one (the world of digital technologies in computers and smartphones); the jungles and forests and the modern metropolis – the world on fire.


English text (click)