This series of work is part of The Tobacco Files, a long-term project that takes the form of an encyclopaedia of images. The images depict, promote, sublimate or bear witness to our societies' connections with tobacco. Whether historical or current images, they appear with a sense of anticipation, like afterimages or already ghostly images. Ad the same time, cigarettes are gradually disappearing from the public space while tobacco production and trafficking remain an opaque activity. The Tobacco Files project began with a creative residency at the Secession in Vienna, Austria, and was developed thanks to the Franklin Azzi endowment fund in Paris, where Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann was given a residency and an exhibition in 2023.

The To the Princess series consists of an edition of 5 posters of images found on the internet which are representative of the cinematic, glamorous and gore aspect related to cigarettes at a certain time. On the foreground there is text that flows from one poster to the other, a paragraph fro Tom Robbins' 'Still Life with Woodpecker' (1980), quoted in the preface of "The Cigarette Century - The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America" by Allan M. Brandt (2007).

The fragmentation of the text in five parts aludes to a shared cigarette that ispassed on between friends. The full text reads as follows: To the Princess, it was an enigma why anyone would smoke, yet the answer seems simple enough when we station ourselves at that profound interface of nature and culture formed when people take something from the natural word and incorporate it into their bodies. Three of the four elements are shared by all the creatures, but fire was a gift to humans alone. Smoking cigarettes is as intimate as we can become with fire without immediate excruciation. Every smoker is an embodiment of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and bringing it on back home. We smoke to capture the power of the sun, to pacify Hell, to identify with the primordial spark, to feed on the marrow of the volcano. It’s not the tobacco we’re after but the fire. When we smoke, we are performing a version of the fire dance, a ritual as ancient as lightning. Does that mean that chain smokers are religious fanatics? You must admit there’s a similarity. The lung of the smoker is a naked virgin thrown as a sacrifice into the godfire.

Production Fonds de dotation Franklin Azzi.