Julian Charrière

JULIAN CHARRIERE:

My enrollment was a crucial step in my journey as a young artist. It enabled me to open my eyes to an impressive range of horizons, disciplines and modes of knowledge production that I hadn’t necessarily had access to before. This idea of exchange between disciplines, seeking common points or sometimes oppositions in dialogue with other fields, had a profound impact on me. For example, observing what a specialist or a discipline explores, identifying gaps or shortcomings and trying to fill them, often allowed new questions to emerge. Olafur and I also share a deep love for nature and landscape, not only as a visual or intellectual concept but as a bodily experience.

Studying alongside him gave me the unique opportunity to immerse myself in the world of contemporary art. This world, which often remains abstract for a fine arts student, suddenly seemed tangible to me, particularly thanks to Olafur’s studio being located just below the classroom.

JULIAN CHARRIERE:

The world we inhabit, which we transform through our actions and often degrade through ignorance or excess, quickly became the centre of gravity in my artistic research. Very early on, I felt the need to go and encounter this world, not as a mere observer but as an interlocutor engaged in a direct and sometimes uncomfortable dialogue. This led me to scar-bearing places where the dynamics of power and exploitation, inscribed in the very material of the landscape, reveal the trace of our passage. These areas can be places of extraction but also spaces transformed, consciously or not, by the concepts that we impose on them.

By taking an interest in the world, we’re inevitably led to question the complex relationship between our species and all other forms of life or agents that coexist with us, and share and shape the same spaces. Exploring these dynamics also means seeking to understand the violence inherent in some of our actions: why does this happen? And what does it mean to enter landscapes transformed, sometimes irreversibly, by human action or inaction? […] This implies talking about ecology – the glue that connects all forms of life, all elements, in a complex framework. It constitutes the very fabric of what we call reality.

JULIAN CHARRIERE:

As an artist, I claim a conceptual heritage. I start from the idea, the concept, and then distill it into a concrete form [that] can exist in different modalities and develop in various media. In general, it’s the theme with which I’m in dialogue that will determine the final form. The plurality of media that I use comes directly from the intuition guiding me when I begin to materialise my ideas. My research is then translated into a form that’ll subsequently inhabit and structure an exhibition.

I think it’s essential to explore different forms of expression when we want to approach the complexity of the world and our relationship with it. The world cannot be reduced to a single perspective and to convey all its richness we must offer a multiplicity of sensory experiences. Today, it seems essential to go beyond the simple connection to the visual and design exhibitions capable of engaging the entire body in a synesthetic experience.

JULIAN CHARRIERE:

It was my fascination for volcanoes, these mountains of fire that embody genesis and finitude, fragility and power. Volcanoes remind us of the intrinsic vitality of geology, often perceived as immobile and inert. To witness the eruption of a volcano, of the birth or destruction of a landscape, is to be confronted with a primordial force that exceeds our understanding and puts our own existence into perspective. There’s a very profound moment of humility there. Volcanoes as ambassadors of the depths embody this fundamental tension between creation and destruction. They fertilise the earth and give birth to ecosystems but are capable of total annihilation.

As I explored, I sought a medium that could capture this essence. Video proved insufficient to express the depth of my encounters, so I turned to sound because volcanoes have voices. They murmur, rumble, and sometimes howl – messages that seem to come from another time, another order. These sounds interest me because they’re not only physical manifestations but also metaphors for the inaudible, echoes of a world we only touch upon.

JULIAN CHARRIERE:

I started working on the sound of volcanoes in 2012 during a trip to Erta Ale in Ethiopia where I made my first sound recordings. The sound of volcanoes, in its raw power and vibratory range, fascinated me from the start. It is not only an audible sound, but a spectrum that includes infrasonic vibrations imperceptible to the human ear but that the body can sometimes feel. With the Stone Speakers project, I wanted to explore and amplify this dimension. Through recording these inaudible sounds and working on their restitution in an exhibition space, I tried to make this hidden part of the natural world palpable. The idea was to immerse the viewer in an experience where sound is not just heard but physically experienced, almost like an inner tremor, a confrontation with the primordial forces of the planet.

This project also poses a fundamental question about our way of perceiving the Earth: what does it mean to listen to a volcano? In Stone Speakers, volcanoes are no longer just geological elements; they become active agents, bearers of a language that invites us to rethink our relationship with the environment. It’s an attempt to elevate these natural forces to the rank of speakers, capable of transmitting a story inscribed in the depth of time and matter.

JULIAN CHARRIERE:

It was, in a way, an attempt to think of Paris outside the tumult of modernity to reveal what lies beneath. Creating such a space was about imagining, speculatively, a place capable of connecting us to distant realities […] that seem foreign to our daily lives but that actually ground us. I asked myself: what if we could manage, even momentarily, to silence the din of our society, to deactivate this constant noise of modernity and allow another kind of listening to emerge? Could we capture the murmurs of the Earth – these forgotten frequencies, too often drowned in the tumult of our lives?

This work was also a reflection on our growing inability to listen not just with our ears but our whole being [to] distant places that aren’t necessarily geographical but might be temporal, historical or buried in our own collective unconscious. In silence, these spaces open up, allowing us to resonate with forces beyond our control but which remind us, with astonishing clarity, of our belonging to this global, organic, living system. The Palais de Tokyo has become a kind of instrument, a sounding board amplifying these echoes. I aimed to offer an immersive experience, an invitation to slow down, to feel, and perhaps to relearn how to listen – not just to sounds but to what lies in between them. This approach is at the heart of my work: how to go beyond the obvious, the visible and the audible to touch something deeper and more essential. Ultimately, the question begs: if we can manage to suspend our own agitation for a moment, to slow down and listen, what else does the Earth have to whisper to us?

JULIAN CHARRIERE:

We used scientific devices designed to allow volcanologists to monitor magmatic movements and volcanic eruptions. By collaborating with different institutes, my collaborators Félix Deufel, Victor Mazon and I had access to this live data. Our approach consisted of “bringing these frequencies to the surface”, making them almost audible, while maintaining this intermediate zone where they are at the limit of auditory and bodily perception. The public feels these vibrations both through the body and perceives them through the ear, thus creating a unique immersive experience.

The “sonified” data also fulfill another function: that of reshaping the sound composition created specifically for the space. The composition is derived from recordings made on five volcanoes and is continually corrected, directed and reinterpreted by the live data. So, the activity of a volcano acts like an invisible conductor influencing the sounds perceived by the visitor and the way in which the composition is transformed in real time. This double dialogue creates a living interaction between the volcanic material and the exhibition space of the Palais de Tokyo.

JULIAN CHARRIERE:

As I write this, I’m in Punta Arenas, Chile, about to embark aboard the Falkor II, the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s scientific vessel, accompanied by a team of researchers from the National Geographic Society. I’m deeply honoured to join this expedition to the White Continent and observe the work of 20 exceptional researchers, exploring the mysteries that extend from the depths of the Southern Ocean to its icy shores.

During this expedition, I’ll continue my own work, including making a film that begins in Greenland, beneath the sea ice and icebergs, and reveals a rarely seen submerged world. This film is one of the central pieces of my upcoming exhibition, Midnight Zone, at the Tinguely Museum this spring. It’ll be presented alongside another underwater film shot above the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone in the Pacific that highlights one of the most urgent threats of the 21st century: deep-sea mining. The exhibition will invite [visitors] to delve into the mysteries of the aquatic kingdom, explore its fragility and question the deep links that unite humanity with this liquid universe.