Julian Charrière

Julian Charrière is a revelatory force of socially engaged contemporary art, creating sculptures, videos and photos that marry art, science and anthropology. A former student of Olafur Eliasson, the 34-year-old is poised to become a leader in Anthropocene art, with work that acknowledges the environmental changes caused by human activity. After participating in the Venice Biennale in 2017, his career accelerated under the impetus of the Dittrich & Schlechtriem gallery, which gives its prodigy carte blanche to create increasingly impactful exhibitions. He has exhibited in major museums and art fairs in North America, Asia and Europe, and recently at the Centre Pompidou in Paris as part of his nomination for the 2021 Marcel Duchamp Prize. His installation there consists of a kind of polar cave, whose floor – an anthracite terrazzo – is punctuated by monumental columns. Also on display is a video artwork, Pure Waste, in which Charrière appears as a Greek mythological hero on an expedition in the Arctic desert.

MEHDI DAKHLI : Can you tell us about your installation at the Centre Pompidou?

JULIAN CHARRIÈRE : Once you enter the room and see the installation, the columns, you see drill bits that were used on oil rigs in the North Sea – real traces of aggression, the perforation of glaciers. What interests me is the technological apparatus that surpasses us, the exoskeleton of modernity that, in a way, allows our bodies to project us into places we are not meant to go to – in this case, the depths of the Earth, under ice and snow, via the trephines. Next to that, there’s a sculpture called Touching the Void and, at its tip, a diamond I created. This diamond is part of a series, but it’s the only one left: I went to the Arctic to throw five diamonds I’d created as a gesture of reconciliation and offering – which is what I’m showing in the video [Pure Waste]. This actually originates from Towards No Earthly Pole [a 2019 video work and installation exploring the topography of remote places, including Iceland and Greenland]. I thought about that project when I was creating this work. The idea of the project is really to see the polar cap as a kind of interface between the Earth and the sky, which is only a gaseous state.

MD : This installation considers how polar glaciers are like memory archives. Can you tell us more about this?

JC : The sky relies on ice to freeze and preserve its history: states of the atmosphere are preserved in ice. We’ve known this for a long time. But it was only in the 1970s that we really managed to unravel the secret of air bubbles and therefore project ourselves into time immemorial – to see what the state of the atmosphere was. The sky is in constant flux, so it is never frozen. I can’t go and see the state of the sky 10 years ago. On the other hand, we can look into this mirror and try to decrypt it, to decode it. I started to think about cryospheres, and whether glaciers come close to being an “oracle” that you can question about the state of the atmosphere hundreds of years ago. I offered this oracle five diamonds that I had created from carbon dioxide. Usually, an oracle asks questions, gives an omen. What interests me is the idea of the oracle of the 21st century, the silent oracle from whom we will seek answers.

MD : How did you create these diamonds?

JC : Rather than continue extracting and always going underground, why can’t we look for [diamonds] in the air now? Technologies have been developed today – such as the Direct Air Capture of Dr. Aldo Steinfeld, who helped me on this project – that use membranes to filter the air and recover some of the CO2 particles. The idea was to try to extract the carbon from this CO2 – to make diamonds out of air. The idea was to mine the sky rather than glaciers. Diamonds are a symbol of eternity and purity, as snow can be, and I wanted to complete the circle in creating those diamonds from air and giving them back to Earth as a peace offering, throwing them into the Arctic. Those diamonds are the most sustainable diamonds you can create as they are made out of CO2.

MD : How did you find this “oracle” in the poles?

JC : The poles today have a sort of magnifying effect. The reality of the present is, in some way, augmented in the North and South Poles: we can see the effects of climate change in advance. On the polar cap, you are standing on a magnified present and, at the same time, on all the strata of the past below you. Thanks to this information, you have the possibility of reading the future. Scientists asked the oracle questions; the oracle responded and gave them clues; they reported this information to us. But society, in a way, did not take this information into account and continued to act the way it acts, continued to build modernity, continued to burn fossil material that had been sequestered 300 million years ago by plants. We are observing a great reversal between the sky and the Earth, with the sky becoming Earth: the Earth is the memory of the sky that we are losing.