One could think of Julian Charrière’s body of work as a lucid dream: otherworldly, yet deeply rooted in materiality. Conducting field research in the most extreme conditions, the French-Swiss artist explores critical geological phenomena such as fossil fuels, plantations, icebergs, volcanoes, and radioactive zones. We spoke to the artist in light of his new Stone Speakers project, delving into his deconstructive approach to human-nature relations.
Perched alone atop Europe’s mightiest active volcano, Mount Etna, a solitary microphone braves the primal roar of molten lava surging from Earth’s core. Against this raw power, it appears fragile—a human instrument dwarfed by nature’s ancient voice. This striking scene is part of French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière’s project, which explores the delicate interplay between humanity and nature’s forces, capturing the profound tension between our world and the wild. A former student of Olafur Eliasson, Charrière graduated in 2013 from Berlin’s Institute for Spatial Experiments, where he is currently based. Since then, he has exhibited his work internationally, including at the Centre Pompidou and the Venice Biennale. His art often confronts geological and botanical timelines through film, sculpture, and spatial interventions, frequently engaging the public realm.
Paris’s Palais de Tokyo is currently hosting Charrière’s latest work Stone Speakers, where recordings of volcanic sounds captured through a lone microphone take centre stage. The show brings together sounds from volcanoes worldwide, such as in Colombia, Ethiopia, Iceland, Indonesia, and Italy. Through these sounds, Charrière invites viewers to experience the raw, untamed power of our planet while reflecting on humanity's attempts to understand, measure, and coexist with its elemental forces. At its heart, Stone Speakers encourages a contemplation of the ways we connect to landscapes that are both timeless and unpredictable.
While this may seem like a distant contemplation of nature, Charrière explains that he rejects the term environment: ‘It suggests something separate from us, something around us, when in reality, we’re all part of it’ he states. This permeability between the human and non-human is especially evident in his public space interventions, which bridge space, time, matter, and landscape, bringing together multiple perspectives.
'When we exploit nature, we are actually exploiting ourselves'
Rewilding the public space
From urban pigeon traps to giant live-streamed forests in bustling squares, Charrière’s public space interventions often carry a political message addressing ecological concerns. His early collaboration with German artist Julius von Bismarck, Some Pigeons Are More Equal Than Others (2012), featured a pigeon trap installed in Berlin, Venice, and Copenhagen, which painted the birds with non-toxic dyes. This provocative bio art work blended into the urban landscape, questioning interspecies cohabitation and animal rights while disrupting the everyday perception of one of the species that live most closely with humans.
In his more recent piece Calls for Action in Basel, Charrière adopts a more intimate approach to endangered ecosystems: a large screen broadcasts a live feed from the Western Andean cloud forest in Ecuador, placed in the market square. This digital window into a biodiversity hotspot is paired with a phone booth, inviting people to listen or engage in dialogue with the rainforest. Through interactive works like these, Charrière raises awareness while navigating the gaps between ethics and aesthetics. He often juxtaposes the ecstatic beauty of disappearing landscapes with their impending loss, drawing our attention to remote locations and their fragile futures.
Field research
To bring audiences closer to remote places with unique geophysical identities, Charrière spends extended periods in the field, supported by local experts and scientists. Fieldwork informs his declared intention to ‘unlearn’, disrupting personal echo chambers and embracing what he describes as the necessary discomfort of discovery. He challenges binary perspectives that separate nature and culture, asserting that: 'When we exploit nature, we are actually exploiting ourselves’. Deconstructing worldviews that treat the planet as an external resource to be exploited is central to his practice, which translates embodied experiences into art.
The material culture in Charrière’s work reveals an interest in raw materials, waste from extraction sites, and the geological stratification that holds memory. Deep time—geological time, which stretches far beyond human existence—is another key thread in his practice, challenging the Western tendency to place humans at the centre of the universe. Can the oniric and uncanny coexist? By engaging with these expanded temporalities, the artist’s mysticism and references to altered states emerge, creating spaces where answers are elusive and questions take precedence.
Field research
To bring audiences closer to remote places with unique geophysical identities, Charrière spends extended periods in the field, supported by local experts and scientists. Fieldwork informs his declared intention to ‘unlearn’, disrupting personal echo chambers and embracing what he describes as the necessary discomfort of discovery. He challenges binary perspectives that separate nature and culture, asserting that: 'When we exploit nature, we are actually exploiting ourselves’. Deconstructing worldviews that treat the planet as an external resource to be exploited is central to his practice, which translates embodied experiences into art.
The material culture in Charrière’s work reveals an interest in raw materials, waste from extraction sites, and the geological stratification that holds memory. Deep time—geological time, which stretches far beyond human existence—is another key thread in his practice, challenging the Western tendency to place humans at the centre of the universe. Can the oniric and uncanny coexist? By engaging with these expanded temporalities, the artist’s mysticism and references to altered states emerge, creating spaces where answers are elusive and questions take precedence.
'There’s a certain vitality to geology that you can witness by observing a volcano'
Stone Speakers
Stone Speakers represents Julian’s latest exploration of vast, mysterious, and unpredictable temporalities, poetically reminding us of our own smallness. This largely aerial installation, born from intimate sonic encounters, is accompanied by mineral sculptures that punctuate the crater exhibition like eerie guardians with obsidian eyes (A Stone Dream of You, 2024). 'The work presents a spectrum of sounds that challenges how we listen.’ the artist explains. ‘ ‘By using various types of microphones—some multi-directional, capturing surface soundscapes, while others, like geophones and seismographs, record frequencies beyond human hearing—it explores the many layers through which sound can be experienced.’ he adds.
Charrière is particularly intrigued by active volcanoes, which, unlike other mountains, undergo metamorphoses on smaller time scales, offering temporalities that resonate with human perception. ‘There’s a certain vitality to geology that you can witness by observing a volcano, which ultimately acts as a portal from below to above, like a geo-speaker serving as an ambassador of the underground’. He explains how his listening experience made him realise volcanoes have their own voice revealing interconnected fluxes. To better understand these messages, Charrière collaborated with scientists, imagining 'volcanoes having vocal organs, expanding and contracting like our throats.' This approach sparked an exploration of the relationship between the human voice and the volcanic one, where 'the voices of different volcanoes could surface, reaching and touching us.' Stone Speakers transports viewers 'somewhere between stratigraphy and reality’, bridging complex, elemental forces and re-enchanting their ancient energy.
Charrière’s prolific journey continues to unfold, as he explores extreme and fascinating forces. His upcoming exhibition, Solarstalgia, opening at the Arken Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark at the end of November 2024, will explore the path of sunlight and its material forms. He shared with Minimal Collective that his next chapter will delve into deep-sea mining, probing our connection to this alien realm, home to unique species found nowhere else on Earth, while highlighting the risks of disturbing this fragile, poorly understood ecosystem.
By pushing the limits of human knowledge with a critical focus on ecological concerns, Charrière positions himself as a unique contemporary explorer—one capable of bringing the alienation of nature into our everyday lives. He leaves us to wonder: what, or who, is truly alien?
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