At the still point of the turning world . .
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
—T. S. Eliot

© Julian Charrièrre; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany; Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, NY.
Photo by Aurélien Mole, courtesy of the artist and Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles.
At this point of his burgeoning career, Julian Charrière has managed to garner international acclaim whereby descriptors such as “poetry,” “haunting,” and “bracing” are often critically ascribed to his environmentally themed photographs, films, and dramatically immersive installations. Through his works, Charrière envisions an archeology of time that aims to conjure both imaginative and revelatory connections to controversial, albeit familiar, subjects that include the evolution of the planet, the climate crisis, as well as the ecological and humanitarian costs resulting from our ever-expanding technologies. Born in 1987, the French-Swiss artist studied at the École cantonale d’art du Valais before moving to Berlin to finish his degree at the Universität der Künste where he graduated in 2013 from Olafur Eliasson’s Institut für Raumexperimente (Institute of Spatial Experiments).

© Julian Charrièrre; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany; Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, NY.
Photo by Aurélien Mole, courtesy of the artist and Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles.
Today, Charrière’s process is initially conducted through daring fieldwork in remote locations around the world, which he painstakingly documents—from open pit mines and oil drilling sites rigged with imploding fireworks, to Semipalatinsk, a former Soviet testing ground for nuclear weapons, and its American counterpart Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, both of which are still radioactive. He scaled Mexican volcanoes for a series of works, and traveled to the north of Greenland for one of his most controversial pieces, a solo “confrontative” performance atop an iceberg, which he attempted to melt with a blowtorch over a period of eight hours. Frequently, Charrière brings back to the studio—and into his museums and gallery exhibitions—physical reminders that he has culled or excavated from these explorations to use for his installations. In a piece titled Future Fossil Spaces (2014), for instance, he harvested salt and lithium by piercing through the surface of the Uyuni Desert of Bolivia—the world’s largest salt flat. He transformed these materials into a sculptural cloister of columns made of by stacks of salt tiles juxtaposed with vats of the pastel-colored lithium brine.
On a recent stay in Paris, I visited Charrière’s exhibition Stone Speakers: Les bruits de la terre at the Palais de Tokyo. The 2024 installation was set off in a corner of the cavernous spaces of the museum. Access to it was rather awkward and unwieldy. After the ritualistic removal of shoes, I was ushered into a pitch-black room. Blindly navigating the space, I apologized as I fell backwards into a wall of black curtains, having mistaken the thick cradling cloth for fellow viewers. Finally, in the darkness, flat on my back against the vibrating floor, I was engulfed by a rumbling, deafening soundtrack, which triggered for this jaded yet installation-savvy New Yorker evocations of subway grates—though only momentarily.

© Julian Charrière; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany; Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, NY.
Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles.
Seconds later, I was redeemed. As my eyes adjusted to the obscurity of the room, a craggy duo of large excavated rocks appeared at the center of the floor in what was intended as a recreation of the interior of a volcanic cave. Spotlit from above, these pale gray mineral sculptures, scarred by burnt striations and fissures of lava, had been enlivened by shiny egg-shaped black stones embedded into their cavities at different angles. Flickering light cast back from their reflective and porous surfaces metamorphosed both pieces into strangely ethereal shift-shaping forms with sparkling eyes gazing outwards. The atmosphere was intensified by subsonic recordings of volcanos located in Ethiopia, Iceland, Indonesia, and Sicily. Heightened orchestrations of tremorous seismic tides and the oscillating movements of tectonic plates at fluctuating decibels echoed throughout the space. These metaphoric heartbeats—intended by the artist to be “meditative and unsettling at once”—in tandem with our two haptic rocky companions of sorts seem designated to serve as a compass to guide us beyond the sensorial boundaries we have failed to navigate; to trespass into what lays beneath us: the earthly core.
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Stone Speakers: Les bruits de la terre, Palais de Tokyo, Paris on view from October 17, 2024 to January 5, 2025. Ongoing or upcoming exhibitions include: The Atomic Age, Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, through February 9, 2025; Night Glow, Galerie Tschudi, Zurich, through March 22, 2025; and Solarstagia, ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj, Denmark, through April 20, 2025.