Julian Charrière: Cultural Spaces 

Julian Charriere belongs to the category of artists whose practice is rooted in scientific principles. His projects involve extensive research, preparation, and fieldwork before the actual fabrication of artworks begins. With immense curiosity, he ventures into realms far removed from contemporary everyday life, let alone contemporary art, situating himself outside of a linear time-space perception. Hence, his work addresses vast topics such as time, space and humanity — subjects seemingly impossible to grasp. And yet, Charrière consistently manages not only to build his projects within these boundaries but also to maintain a conceptual framework that reflects his directive line.

Charrière’s body of work resists easy labeling in terms of style, as many of his pieces are not invented or traditionally created but are rather transformations of objects taken from other spaces or conditions. Nevertheless, his final productions exude consistent synesthetic energy that reflects the unity of his approach. In his creations, time and space fuse. Without delving into scientific quantum theory, Charrière explores how humanly perceived time intersects with deep geological time, while immediate surroundings blend with the planetary immensity. By playing with scale, he brings human-sized pieces of primordial planetary materials—remnants of ancient geological spaces—into the contemporary historical and art context. In short, Charrière brings deep time into the present, urging reflection on human hubris.

For example, his early piece On the Sidewalk, I Have Forgotten the Dinosauria (2013) in which he core-drills, compresses and exposes an 80-meter-deep cylinder of Berlin ground, suggests that urban spaces—the very land beneath our feet—are loaded with layered information dating back not only millennia of human activity but millions of years of planetary upheaval. Charrière alludes that time packed into space is a form of information storage—perhaps a human way of recognizing data. And it is precisely those few thousand years of human existence, a brief moment on the planetary scale, that have set off our full cultural appropriation of space. Moreover, crucially for us, this alteration provides the only perceptive frame through which we, people, are able to grasp our surroundings.
In his artistic investigations, Charrière explores both cultural (mines, nuclear sites, cities) and non-cultural spaces (virgin forests, glaciers, volcanoes). Paradoxically, through his artistic intervention —and by eventually extracting specimens presented as artworks later becoming cultural objects themselves—, places change their meaning. By physically engaging with nature and presenting it in ways never seen before, he makes it accessible to human cultural understanding. 

The influence of Duchamp’s readymades is palpable in Charrière’s work, though he does go further by physically or perceptually altering the objects. In his 2021 piece Soothsayer, for instance, a large block of coal is carved to fit a human head, transforming it from a mass of fuel into a divination tool. “Sooth,” an archaic term for truth, is incidentally also the root of “soothe.” Placing one’s head inside the coal may allow a glimpse of the future read on the bowels of the earth, just as the ancients would perform anthropomancy, prophesying on the entrails of men and women dying sacrificed. Or, perhaps, the coal could comfort us, pacify the continuous anxiety facing our imperative need to change, all the while enveloping us in a familiar pattern of consumption.  

Following the above example, we shall look at the 2014 work Tropisme, where Charrière cryogenized a number of plants of species that originated over 100 million years ago during the Cretaceous period, and which exist today as commonplace houseplants, such as orchids or cacti. By preserving them at -20°C in special refrigerators, covered in a thin layer of white powder-like ice, the artist transforms the plants into future fossils exothermically protected from entropy and decay.

In other works the specimens remain unchanged, while their visual context and display are fully altered. The 2022 project Panchronic Garden presents an assemblage of vegetation species that originated some 300 million years ago. In exhibition rooms illuminated solely by infrared light, in what seems like a basement or deep underground, the plants appear dark, almost coal-black, referencing their geological cradle period, the Carboniferous (“coal-bearing”). These ferns, horsetails, and cycads are the descendants of the flora that bore the vast reserves of coal: the photosynthesized and fossilized sunlight. They ultimately fueled the Industrial Revolution, the home of the Soothsayer. The seldom stroboscopic flashes evoking mute lightning or perhaps, fleeting explosions, relocate us back to a contemporary time with forests that look ordinarily green, locking us into a cycle of birth, decay, and consumption.

With his 2024 project Call for Action, Charrière forgoes the physical extraction of samples altogether, instead creating a connection between contemporary human settings and an original space. The work links the Andean Cloud Forest of Ecuador to an audience in Basel’s Marktplatz through live video and telephone communication. Visitors are invited not only to observe and hear the forest but also to speak to it, their voices broadcasted back, mingling with Ecuadorian birdsong.
As a conceptual continuation, between Call for Action and Panchronic Garden, one can place the 2019 film Towards No Earthly Pole. Here, glacial landscapes in Greenland, Iceland, the Alps, and the Arctic are shown in fundamentally changed, unnatural settings that create eerie, never-seen-before views. Similar to the Panchronic Garden, the terrestrial space appears at times subterranean, as buried remains of a past world. The artist shoots in the pitch dark, under full night skies, illuminating the landscapes only with unidirectional artificial light achieving an impossible chiaroscuro effect.

Semiotically speaking, Charrière engages in a complex double act. On one hand, by extracting samples of a larger space, and changing their perceptive context, the signifier (ex. a plant) is condensed to a synecdoche, and so it modifies the signified (ex. the representation of a forest). A non-cultural space (ex. a virgin forest) thus becomes cultural. On the other hand, through the above process, he actually bypasses the original signifier (i.e. the plant), and acts directly on the signified (i.e. the representation of a forest), allowing as such a completely new perception of the original space (i.e. the virgin forest). The described process takes place also with the transformation of culturally charged spaces (such as mines, cities etc.), where through his practice, the artist amends the cultural value and apprehension of the location. 

What may seem like a report on the Ecuadorian forest’s current state or a documentary film about glaciers, is, in fact, a transfiguration through which Charrière alters conditions and perceptions to create new or renewed cultural spaces. His work is compelling precisely because of this transformative process of turning nature into culture, by presenting it through unique visual and conceptual lenses, providing new human projections and perspectives. The idea of a place becoming “cultural” is not tied to its age but to the significance humans attribute to it, which can change, diminish or increase over time. Effectively, culture is nothing more than the condensation of human ways of perception, and the artist is particularly interested in exploring fluctuations in cultural substance. Today, we live on what Charrière calls a “cultural planet”(1), as most places on Earth have been distorted by human activity either through observation and adaptation, or through exploitation, excavation, and depletion. 

Some places cease to be cultural as soon as they vacate the human imaginary and are reclaimed by nature. Charrière’s 2022 film Controlled Burn can be seen as a surrealist projection of a point zero of cultural transformation. Building on his earlier projects about abandoned radioactive sites like Semipalatinsk and Bikini Atoll, Controlled Burn stages a potential reversal of cultural influence. The work was originally conceived for the Langen Foundation as a deconstruction of pyromodernity. Shot in a decommissioned coal mine, the film was inspired by the energetically charged region of Düsseldorf through nuclear power and coal mining. Through it, Charrière brings our focus to fire, our historical ally in technological and cultural evolution. Its role has gradually merged with the intangible aspects of modern life, such as electricity and data, rendering it undetectable. Once a visible force, fire is now confined within hidden processes — combustion engines, heating systems — exemplifying how our cultural needs and projections have revised elements over time.

One location where the film is projected, the ancient Sainte-Agathe Fort, an extension of the Villa Carmignac on the island of Porquerolles, exemplifies this transformation. The fort’s original purpose, formerly focused on survival and safety, has shifted to artistic enrichment. Within this setting of continuous metamorphosis, Charrière’s work resonates deeply with our humanity, suggesting that cultural shifts can also signal cultural ends. Throughout the film, we are confronted with tangible threats to our existence, echoing the fates of species that have already disappeared. Charrière questions the illusion of control and responsibility in humanity’s ongoing spoliation of the environment and potential self-destruction.

In the film, Charrière explores the inversion of time’s linearity, with fireworks imploding rather than exploding, symbolizing the reversibility of the human timeline — a kind of self-inflicted warfare. The title, which refers to the fires humans start to manipulate assemblage of vegetation and decaying material in landscapes, underscores the illusory sense of control we believe we exert over nature. The imploding fireworks touch with hurting poetry the deepest of our genesis: was the Big Bang an explosion or an implosion; how did our galaxy, sun, or planet form; how did life begin, and how fragile is it; how important is it in the grand scheme of things…?

The film continues with what can be seen as rich constellations breaking into meteor showers. Are they falling stars to cast our wishes upon or the dreadful views witnessed by past species of Terra? Yet all ends are beginnings, and in such — a cycle. What are species but a continuation of shapes? Humans, like all other life forms, participate in this ever-changing, shape-shifting, sequence of existence.

Of course, all interpretations of art are, in the first place, projections. However, what distinguishes Charrière’s artistic approach to me is the perceived absence of a dualistic moral judgment. He does not portray nature as inherently good or bad, nor does he position humans as essentially virtuous or destructive. Instead, he aims to present humans as part of a greater whole, bearing rights and responsibilities — appearing at one point in time and destined to disappear at another. For now, our presence is encoded within our societal constructions, inevitably casting the cultural mapping over our surroundings, and transforming every place we experience into a cultural space. Could this be the essence of the legend of King Midas? 

“So Midas, king of Lydia, swelled at first with pride when he found he could transform everything he touched to gold: but when he beheld his food grow rigid and his drink harden into golden ice then he understood that this gift was a bane and in his loathing for gold cursed his prayer.” (2)

Julian Charrière’s upcoming exhibitions in France continue his fervent exploration of nature. In the fall of 2024, he will present a solo show at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, unveiling a completely new body of work focused on volcanoes. Staying true to his core subjects, he will delve deeper underground, reaching further back into geological time, offering the stage to these mighty and untamed witnesses of Earth’s continuous metamorphosis. In 2025, he plans to begin a new collaboration with Villa Carmignac, taking up residence at the Sainte-Agathe Fort in Porquerolles for the next three years. 

1. Julian Charrière: For They That Sow the Wind, London, Ziba Ardalan/Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, 2016. p. 105
2. Claudian, In Rufinum Liber Primus, Contre Rufinus 1, vol. LCL, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1937, p. 37.

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Head image : Julian Charrière, Controlled Burn, 2022.
Film still. Copyright the artist ; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany.

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