Julian Charrière, installation view (4) INTO THE HOLLOW at DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM, 2016, Copyright Julian Charrière, VG Bild-kunst, Bonn, Courtesy DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM,Berlin, photo by Hans-Georg Gaul
Julian Charrière has mined the blazing sands of Bolivia for lithium, turned household pigeons into tropical rave machines and stood hour after hour in horrific weather conditions trying to thaw a 30,0000 year old iceberg with his blow torch. This time he is fossilising our smartphones, iPads and hard drives into a post-digital geological strata laid out in vitrines and curiosity cabinets throughout the gallery in his third solo exhibition at Dittrich & Schlechtriem entitled “Into the Hollow,” opening gallery weekend. Sleek caught up with Charrière before opening night to discuss The Anthropocene, fossil creation and the irony of snapping an iPhone photo of the exhibition’s works.
Julian Charrière, Metamorphism XIV, 2016, Copyright Julian Charrière, VG Bild-kunst, Bonn, Courtesy DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM,Berlin, photo by Hans-Georg Gaul
Where did your sense of Geology stem from?
As a child I would hike on the mountains, always remembering how they were the product of thousands of years of tectonic movement. You could find seashells forcefully stacked along the walls through heat and pressure, way up on the mountains; testaments of a completely different environment. It felt like I was witnessing a magical world out of my imagination, one that could only be restructured through rigid stones – and it was through them that I could travel through time and space. I guess that’s where this sense that you speak of came from.
Julian Charrière, Metamorphism XVII (Detail), 2016, Copyright Julian Charrière, VG Bild-kunst, Bonn, Courtesy DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM,Berlin, photo by Hans-Georg Gaul
You have a very aesthetically driven approach to perhaps an inevitable political commentary, considering the blow-up buzzword “The Anthropocene.”
The Anthropocene has become a very popular topic nowadays, a concept that can encompass almost everything. In my work it is used more as background to an ongoing investigation on the passage of time and what this means, considering that time itself is a man-made measuring device. What would time look like in a non-anthropocentric universe? It is very difficult to create non-political work, but it’s even more different when a practice is intentionally conceived as political. The political sphere is not a central theme of my work but it is definitely part of its result. Nobody can or should escape this fact.
Julian Charrière, Installation view (2) INTO THE HOLLOW at DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM, 2016, Copyright Julian Charrière, VG Bild-kunst, Bonn, Courtesy DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM,Berlin, photo by Hans-Georg Gaul
You seem to humanize these places of vast disconcerting nature, bringing them closer to us.
It is not my intention to draw attention to their irrevocable force but rather to reverse the twisted distinction that man makes between himself and nature, placing humanity always on a superior plane. I think the idea of disconcerting nature is a concept and an image that we have inherited from the romantic period. These places do not require humanization and they actually do not really exist anymore. In fact, for me, non-appropriated spaces by mankind are the most cultural and interesting spots you can find.
Julian Charrière, Metamorphism XVI, 2016, Copyright Julian Charrière, VG Bild-kunst, Bonn, Courtesy DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM,Berlin, photo by Hans-Georg Gaul
You seem to slip in and out of the roles from anarcho-scientist to anarcho-primitivism… What’s your position?
I don’t believe I could fit in any of these ideologies, which as ideologies often do, already from the beginning profess an absolute truth. It is difficult to establish such rigid assumptions when the main thread of your work is time: something that changes and bends depending on both scientific and emotional aspects. The position of the artist nowadays is much more fluid and dynamic. The artist has the ability to travel through different fields of knowledge with no directions or attachments. To a certain extent, taking a positioning is once again placing the human figure in the middle of everything. Rocks don’t take position and the positions they do take can be accurately measured through geography and not by answering a question. It is this position, or the disposition of things to change, that interests me.
Julian Charrière, Metamorphism XIX (Detail), 2016, Copyright Julian Charrière, VG Bild-kunst, Bonn, Courtesy DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM,Berlin, photo by Hans-Georg Gaul
Taken from the press release it says, “Through this forcible intervention, he initiates a geo-artistic reflection on our digital consumer culture, a ‘geo-reset:’ back to the future.” What’s a “geo-reset?”
It’s a concept that I use to describe a particular process. It is more a metaphor than an assumption. Reset refers to bringing a system back to an initial condition and is often used in technology to describe the recovery of a computer system to its original state. Reset is an analogy that takes this characteristic of the word to the processes that I use to bring manufactured materials back to their original place in stone. It is a way of bridging the primitive with the technological advances characteristic of our culture today through a violent event, simulating those that occur in geology and through this creating an image of a past future.
Julian Charrière, Metamorphism XIV, 2016, Copyright Julian Charrière, VG Bild-kunst, Bonn, Courtesy DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM,Berlin, photo by Hans-Georg Gaul
How does one artificially create a fossil?
Based on the actual meaning of the word, which means to obtain by digging, I would assume that you would have to bury something in the ground, forget about it for a period of time and then discover/recover it by digging it out. Fossils can mean a variety of things and do not necessarily involve the petrification of living and non-living elements. In the case of the stones that I created, I am dealing with a deep geological time cycle – the long process of crystallization, precipitation, transformation of minerals from one state to another and the relationship implicit in the never-ending cycle of retrieving those precious minerals through technology to sustain technology itself.
But to create new geologies, you need to take 20 tons of stone, bring them to Duisburg, heat the whole thing up in a massive blast furnace until it melts to create artificial lava, pour this stony soup into a hole filled with computers and other electronic devices, break it up and bring it back.
Julian Charrière, Installlation view (3) INTO THE HOLLOW at DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM, 2016, Copyright Julian Charrière, VG Bild-kunst, Bonn, Courtesy DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM,Berlin, photo by Hans-Georg Gaul
What is the reality of these fossilized devices? Could they really withstand 10,000 years “in the making?”
More than fossilised devices, these creations constitute an amalgam of minerals artificially brought to a stable condition in a matrice of stone. As with any material, it will change and transform but it will never disappear, it will simply remain in a perpetual state of flux through time. It will withstand more than 10,000 years, but who knows – maybe not in its “fossilized” form.
Julian Charrière, Metamorphism XVII, 2016, Copyright Julian Charrière, VG Bild-kunst, Bonn, Courtesy DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM,Berlin, photo by Hans-Georg Gaul
When I first heard of this project I imagined people documenting the fossilised phones on their own phones. This seems to be a cruel twist of fate in technology, don’t you think?
I think that’s quite a comic aspect of the whole thing. It is also interesting because it brings another layer to the whole discussion. An absurd layer, which I can greatly empathize with. I kind of look forward to the selfies.
Julian Charrière, installation view (1) INTO THE HOLLOW at DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM, 2016, Copyright Julian Charrière, VG Bild-kunst, Bonn, Courtesy DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM,Berlin, photo by Hans-Georg Gaul
“Into the Hollow is on display at Dittrich & Schlechtriem from 29 April until 25 June 2016