You Need to Understand That You Are Lost Before Finding Your Way – An Interview with Julian Charrière

by Alexandra Gilliams

In his latest exhibition Towards No Earthly Pole at the Dallas Museum of Art, Julian Charrière confronts viewers with a new perspective of the Arctic and a heightened understanding of the present moment through its monumental glaciers. With five different projects by Charrière on view, this atmospheric exhibition highlights the grandeur of the remote territory where humans have not necessarily intervened and conquered in the way they have through exploration and colonization, yet it continues to be gravely affected by our behavior. His work largely explores the construct of time, our perception of it, and the interferences humans make with nature that influence long and outstanding effects.

His monumental video montage bearing the same name of the exhibition presents the Arctic in a way unlike the images of dying polar bears and melting icebergs that you may have seen before on Google or news websites. Shooting in the pitch black, Arctic night, Charrière used one drone as a spotlight and a second one to film the glaciers, their details heavily contrasted against a mysterious background of pure darkness. They glisten, shift, and move with a sound that makes it seem as if they are alive and breathing. Studying glaciers in order to understand and observe the passage of time, Charrière has described them as a kind of “oracle,” built out of layers of the past that are trapped within its icy facade. Drilling into the ice and observing ice cores, it is possible to observe different climates from far into the past. This “oracle” can equally make us question ourselves, as we look into its surface and see a reflection of the self in this ever-fleeting and vital moment in time. They have also become Anthropocenic representations of what is to come in the future.

He references and uses drill cores from a glacial “erratic” with the perforated stone on view in the center of the exhibition in a project entitled Not All Who Wander Are Lost. Erratics are pieces of stones that have been picked up by moving glacial ice and carried to their present location once the ice has melted. The holes in this piece represent the human consumption of natural resources, which has made the stone lighter. It has the appearance of continuing its journey as it is carried in a fashion reminiscent of ancient transportation methods over the layers of time that are exposed by the cores. As a metaphor for human consumption, if one were to continue drilling, the stone would turn into dust. Working geologically, Charrière is also interested in observing time, as well as referencing colonization and the effects of human interference through botany. With his project Tropisme, the artist froze plants that are native to the Global South and have existed as far back as the extinction of dinosaurs. However, these plants have now been displaced around the world due to human activity. They are on display in refrigerated vitrines as kinds of specimens to be studied and preserved for future use, or where they are perhaps waiting to be taken to another ecosystem.

Charrière is known for venturing to remote locations that are not widely explored, or ones that have been exploited by the human hand and then abandoned, causing the ecosystem to change and take back its territory. As an artist inspired by stories of explorers both in literature and in history, his research-based practice brings viewers to volcanoes, the Arctic, and multiple abandoned nuclear tests sites. His work allots for the appreciation of the magnificence of nature, its ability to adapt even as we manipulate it, and tells us that it will continue to exist and thrive even after humanity’s demise. The artist questions the function of projecting ourselves into a timeframe in the future that we cannot necessarily comprehend yet, how we have gotten to where we are as a consequence of our past actions, and the middle ground that exists between the two: the present, and its monumental urgency.

Alexandra Gilliams: Your solo exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art, entitled Towards No Earthly Pole, is named after a compilation of nighttime drone footage of glaciers in Greenland, Iceland, and the Alps. There are five series of works in this exhibition, however, that span from 2013-2019. Why did you choose this title rather than coming up with an entirely different one?

Julian Charrière: The “extreme” parts of the world always have been magnetic for the human mind and imagination. Even if the actual reasons for this fascination as well as the realities of these places change over centuries, they continue to fascinate, lure, and often trap us as the last stronghold and melting ideal of a fantasized reality.

Towards No Earthly Pole at the Dallas Museum of Modern Art is my first institutional solo exhibition in the USA and the last one of a trilogy starting at MASI Lugano, followed by the Aargauer Kunsthaus under the same title, and is also connected through a publication of the same name. For me, the three exhibitions are complementary and each of them articulates around the central work, Towards No Earthly Pole. The film is a kind of culmination of topics that have occupied me for years now. I was working for quite a long time on the project, and many focuses of my work came up again during this period, almost like a thematic climax without a real conclusion. The works are consistent with each other; together they open up a narrative that leads throughout the exhibition, somehow guided by the film that gives the exhibition its title. It felt naturally innate to actually keep the same title for the three venues.

AG: Each piece in this exhibition is visually bold in itself, yet they could appear relatively abstract until one reads between the lines. Could you describe how these pieces relate to one another in the context of this exhibition?

JC: The whole show is almost conceived as a glacial “tongue” retrieving throughout the exhibition. This movement, or let’s call it spirit, already begins from the outside, with the water from the fountain in front of the museum. Inside the visitors physically face ice, included in Tropisme, and also the very absence of it, with the erratics that seemingly draw the ancient glacier motion while being affected by human influence. Not All Who Wander Are Lost symbolizes both a movement that much older than the existence of human beings and one that is pretty contemporary. The film Towards No Earthly Pole is the core of the exhibition, the place where the viewer is visually confronted with glaciers. The show revolves around the different states of the material of water and therefore the pieces respond to one and another: the ice and its absence is a narrative that opens up various perspectives. The images from the series The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories reflect a performance that I did in 2013 when I attempted to melt an iceberg underneath my feet, and somehow marks a special view on the same topic that I wouldn’t say is only personal, but relates to developments happening in the world. The fountain in Beneath It all Flows Liquid Fire is also about human influence in terms of how we have domesticated water and how for decades we hold the element under control as a cultural practice, or at least we tried to.
The exhibition emphasizes the agency of water and its manifestations. More than carrying a single strong message, I see the exhibition in Dallas as an atmosphere; it can expand and contract in every direction, with each of its constituents reacting with one another. I wish for the viewer to wander through gaseous states, trying to grasp onto something stable, but being destabilized again as the ground seems to slide out from under their feet. You first need to understand that you are lost before being able to find your way. This thought is a key element to the whole work complex and an invitation to recalibrate one’s world vision.

AG: I find your techniques for research and inspiration to be captivating, with many of your pieces inspired by literary works and their fictional characters, and/or references to history. In The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories, you describe yourself as a “quixotic” hero, wherein you are photographed stubbornly burning the ice of a vast glacier with a blow torch. You used radioactive material while developing the photographs that you had taken of the Semipalatinsk test site in Russia and in Bikini Atoll, referencing Henri Becquerel’s discovery of radioactivity using photographic materials. Could you take me through a bit of what your research process and inspiration was like for one or a few of the works in this exhibition?

JC: To be very honest, personal interests and actuality often intersect with each other. It just so happens that some of the locations and topics that I have chosen to engage with derive from this coincidence. My interests extend further than just the meanings that such places carry with them or that “we” apply to them. More importantly, it exists in their tangible realities, their materialistic presence, geographical and geological characteristics, the spaces in which they exist and evolve, and the feelings that they evoke. I normally try to expose myself to a given situation in order to start a dialogue. It is very spontaneous and driven by circumstance, and once I start to engage with a certain subject matter, what follows seems to naturally occur as a consequence.
I sometimes adopt or adapt scientific methodology to my research as I feel that there are many similarities between science and art: The most important for me is the fact that both science and art believe in nothing, but are tirelessly in doubt, trying to make sense of what surrounds us and thus act as engines of change and constantly reinvent reality.
Literature, as you mentioned, is another very important point of departure for most of my works and has shaped my understanding of things in general since my early childhood. I love to read and sometimes write, and at the end of the day, for me, language is made of images, as if every text has its own visual double. When I read, I often get lost between the lines, drifting into infinite picture worlds which sometimes, after a while, have nothing to do with the content of the text anymore, but open up and become a creative substance. I try to precipitate the flow of images in a certain form or by freezing the image. An image or form that contains all the others: a holotype. But perhaps a concrete example could explain it even better: One of the authors that stuck in my head since the beginning is Jules Verne, whose world-vision influenced me from an early age and whose stories have followed me ever since I read them. One of the reasons I admire him is that he narrates fiction based on science that in some cases have become reality. The author has the capability to make forecasts out of his creativity and way of seeing the world, and that really inspires me.
For example, his novel The Purchase of the Northpole in 1889, in which the artic regions are on sale and the Americans come up with the absurd idea of removing the tilt of the Earth’s Axis by the recoil of a huge cannon to level climate zones and generate the same conditions all over the world. The goal was actually to get access to the resources lying underneath the Arctic ice – it is a very present topic that inspired me for my work of the same title The Purchase of the Southpole, which was also a part of the Towards No Earthly Pole exhibition in Switzerland. Unfortunately it couldn’t make it to the United States as it is simply not possible to ship this huge sculpture around the world. I developed this work for the 1st Antarctic Biennial, where I proposed to be the first person to shoot a weapon toward the South Pole since the signing of the Antarctic Treaty. It consisted of a massive air pressure coconut cannon loaded with a coconut that was originally collected on the Bikini Atoll former atomic test site in the middle of the Pacific. Shortly before the sculpture was to embark on its expedition to Antarctica, it was confiscated by the police in Berlin. The work remained shrouded in secrecy for quite a long time, wrapped in blankets salvaged from the Rhône Glacier, which is disappearing rapidly under the same climatic pressures affecting the poles. People who know the novel by Jules Verne will see the source of inspiration for this work immediately, still one doesn’t have to know about the original story to make sense of this work and respond to it.

AG: You have mentioned before that our world in itself is fictional, made up of thousands of stories which result in culture, and the role of the artist is to “co-produce” this culture. Can you elaborate on what this means?

JC: I see the world as having been constructed through stories that have been passed on, and that are fundamental for cultural identities. Or as images that are a part of a collective consciousness and create ideas for what we call our “world” or “reality”, as well as specific terms that form a general understanding of “facts”. A good example could be our concept of “nature” which somehow is totally artificial and subjective, I would rather say that nature per se does not actually exist. It is a cultural construction, a fable that has evolved over millennia to unite humanity as a whole and provide a basis to tell stories. It is fiction that serves as a foundation for every form of society and culture. A concept that changes and shifts depending on culture, time, and space. Another example could be the collective understanding of the Arctic that evolves around the images that the media serves us worldwide. Light blue traces of huge glaciers that rest in the deep blue sea in light sunshine and shimmering icebergs – they shape the way we think about the Arctic, and I found it essential to allocate different imagery for my work. One of the striking aspects of Towards No Earthly Pole is the darkness that underlines my pursuit to stir up our romantic ideas of nature.

AG: You had a book published of the video Towards No Earthly Pole as a part of your three exhibitions of the same title. I was curious to know why you chose to publish a book specifically oriented to this one project, and not a catalog for the exhibitions. How is the book format of Towards No Earthly Pole important to you?

JC: The publication is centered around this project and is simply so much more than a catalog. I see it more as documentation which captures and preserves it from passing time. I had the very exceptional chance to work with some outstanding researchers and writers that only wrote about my work, but also added some really interesting ideas and perspectives beyond the actual exhibition content in several essays. The publication can be seen as an extension of the exhibitions, as a space for an additional intensification of content and thoughts. I was working on Towards No Earthly Pole for more than three years and such a publication gave me the opportunity to take new and diverse perspectives on my work over and over again. I see it as an extension, as an instrument and an outcome at the same time – it was a very special opportunity to resurface the project from a production phase and go deeper into the work conceptually. As different as the writers and their disciplines are, the manifold of outcomes from the contributions all revolve around Towards No Earthly Pole. In addition, there are exhibition views and images of the works exhibited that help carve out the correlations between the pieces and their macrosocial importance. Of course, a publication like this is much more complex than a classic catalog and it wouldn’t be possible to produce something like Towards No Earthly Pole without the help of all authors, and especially that of my genius editor and field philosopher, Dehlia Hannah, who worked on the book extensively. But to come back to your question, the book format arranged like this is just multivalent in terms of its content: I wouldn’t be able to open up so many different perspectives on the topics of my exhibitions without the insights of professionals working in different disciplines.

AG: It seems that the principle of time — the past, the future, but most importantly, the present — is particularly prominent in your practice. You take a look at the past using geological drill cores and bricks of salt from lithium mines, while also examining the effects humans have had presently on nature, as though we are leaving a fossil for the future. You have said you are “trying to look into the past to understand the future, whilst reflecting this onto the present.” Could you tell me more about the importance of time in your work?

JC: Thinking about time and its different historical interpretations is a construction of thought that has long occupied me. It almost seems like a topic that evolves like a mental checkpoint in my mind where every time I pass it, I think about matter and its narratives. My work always comes back to the geological and what it teaches us about our understanding of time. The thought of time being trapped and stored in material opens up so many stories and realities. Both space and time have evolved over decades, but what really changes them in our understanding is the way we think of them. We almost appropriate them in our very own, human understanding of them.

To be less abstract, I assume that certain materials capture different temporal narratives, that by confronting them with each other, they are able to tell us visually about time. For example, how we can envision temporalities that are so much greater than the ones humans think of in their everyday lives? What becomes very clear every time I emphasize an encounter like this is the human position within ecosystems; this force is an important instrument that I work with. Glaciers are a very vivid example. For me, time is captured in ice, changing its conditions over decades but always being present. They can be seen as oracles, telling us about times when humans weren’t as destructive as they are today and being able to make presumptions of the future by carrying very special wisdom with them. Not forgetting about the present, as one can observe themselves reflected and magnified on its surface.

AG: You travel frequently for your projects, albeit to isolated areas, but has the pandemic altered your artistic practice in any way?

JC: Yes, of course. The pandemic changed everything. Firstly, the modus of traveling as a fundamental tool for my artistic practice, but the pandemic also gave me some new opportunities. I was invited to spend three months at a residency in Saudi Arabia by the Red Sea Research Center of the King Abdullah University of Science. It was the first time that I was working directly with scientists in situ, as well as in their research laboratories, in particular with Professor Doctor Francesca Benzoni in the Habitat and Benthic Biodiversity Laboratory. Frankly, I would never have had the time to take part in such an adventure under the circumstances of a normal year. I see myself as very lucky to have had the chance to work in a very different environment despite the general lockdown in place. Sure, a lot of my original plans needed to be canceled, but I tried make the most out of this strange situation.
Also, working on the shows at Aargauer Kunsthaus 2020 and the Dallas Museum of Art this year was characterized by the circumstances everyone is living with nowadays. For example, installing on-site in Dallas without my team was a real challenge, but I at least got the chance to go there by myself as I was coming from Saudi Arabia. Also, now that I’m working on my upcoming projects, I have to subordinate most of my plans to the current situation.

AG: Could you tell me about any future projects that you are currently working on?

JC: I wish I could but I’m in the middle of a pretty intense working process for some upcoming exhibitions and I cannot give away too much information. I’m nominated for the Prix Marcel Duchamp and will have the special chance to exhibit my work at Centre Pompidou this fall besides some other solo exhibitions for example at the gallery Dittrich & Schlechtriem in Berlin and Galerie Tschudi in Switzerland, and I and my Studio in Berlin are realizing a completely new work complex. All I can say right now is that the Arctic and its special ability to teach us about our environment – let’s even call it nature – and the specific role we and our resource management play in is a topic that occupies my thoughts. But besides and within the Arctic, new topics for me like the carbon cycle, air and what its components tell us about our planet, and breathing are going to be involved in my upcoming project. It is about mining the sky and reflecting the cultural value of materials, there may be even a diamond made out of air involved in the overall narrative. But stay tuned, you’ll see what this is all about sooner or later!