Next To a Volcano, You Don’t Exist: Julian Charrière

On the occasion of “Stone Speakers - Les bruits de la terre,” the newest exhibition by Julian Charrière, which opens on October 17th at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, we revisit a feature interview with the artist from 032c Issue #44, accompanied by new unpublished images of his work.

Julian Charrière, making of Stone Speakers, 2024 (copyright of the artist: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany)

A trip on Mount Etna and a conversation with artist Julian Charrière who is changing our perception of the world and who likes an eruption as much as a glass of fine red wine.

Julian Charrière, Controlled Burn | Cooling Tower B.1, 2023 (copyright the artist: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany)

July 2023 in Sicily, right after that hellish heatwave when temperatures hit 47 degrees, amped up by a mercilessly hot desert wind. My terrace was covered with volcanic ash since Mount Etna had just had one of her occasional hiccups—even the clouds above us, 120 kilometers away from the craters, were milky and gray, the sun nothing but a shadow.

A message from Julian Charrière arrived: “You have to come to Iceland! A volcanic eruption has just started that is quite particular: a gigantic caterpillar of red lava moving slowly through the landscape. And we can get closer than anybody.” It was not the first time that I sensed that this was one of the unique attractions of the French-Swiss artist. He takes his art very seriously, is an insatiable collector of knowledge both mythological and scientific, and has a very political approach, in other words: he could be a bore. Yet he is quite the opposite. He’s a daredevil who makes you believe that any adventure is possible—if you just follow him, that is. Instead of Iceland, we settled for a long planned and often postponed hike to the summit craters of Etna, the 3500-meter mountain (a height that’s constantly in flux due to seismic activity) in Eastern Sicily, the biggest active volcano in Europe. For centuries, it has been the source of stories and despair. And when the air is clear, I can see her from my house: a tiny molehill on the horizon, the undisputed queen of Sicily.

We would make our trip with volcanologist Vincenzo Greco who would take us not only around, but into one of the active craters, Julian promised. He knew the guide was reliable because the two of them had previously been on the mountain to make sound recordings of the seismic activities for an upcoming art installation. They had been sitting close to one of the volcano’s mouths, listening to its geological mumblings for hours, hip-deep in snow. Months later, on a bright September afternoon, I put on my cheap Decathlon hiking boots, grabbed my colorful backpack from Prada’s homeless ravers collection (circa 2016) and drove to the Etna to meet Julian.

We met in Linguaglossa, a tiny village on the northern foot of Etna where the local butcher with the charming name Pennisi sells veal patties wrapped in lemon leaves (the acidy juices subtly season the meat). We had a bottle of Contrada R from Franchetti with our meal (surprisingly light yet powerful and nuanced), which might seem like a random if not frivolous side note, but Julian does not believe in an artist’s existence as being dry and joyless. His practice is often linked to the physicality and shamanism of nightlife, and on his travels he searches the best restaurants and local delicacies with almost the same energy that he puts into his work. At least the charming lady in the wine store greeted him with the smile that a knowing salesperson reserves for her top clients: “You’re the one who always buys the good stuff.”

Slightly hungover, we both woke up around 5 am, without alarm. We kept ourselves busy making sandwiches for the crew and didn’t speak about what woke us up so early. But I am pretty sure he felt the same thing I did: We had heard the mountain’s call. A Mercedes Benz Unimog took us to the height of 2800 meters, where our hike would begin. In the car, I thought about the afternoon when this story really started.

Italy's Mount Etna has erupted almost constantly over the past decade, but that didn't stop Julian Charrière from ascending its precarious slopes. He's seen here with a gas mask and a telephoto lens in front of a pool of lava.

In 2021, Julian had a show called “Soothsayers” at Dittrich & Schlechtriem, a Berlin-based gallery that has been working with him since 2011. Julian installed the lithic version of a dream-machine in the center of the darkened gallery space, his version of Brion Gysin’s original from 1962. It featured a raised platform where people, awash with spinning light, could lie down and rest their heads on rectangular pillows made from coal. The inspiration for these headrests came from traditional opium dens, where such pillows had traditionally been made from jade stone. In the middle of the installation, titled Vertigo, was a giant onyx boulder. Above it hung perforated drill core from the rock itself, its hollowed-out core spat light and steam. Abstract, weird noises filled the room. It was the rumbling, breathing, and hissing of two volcanoes, one in Iceland, the other in Ethiopia, that Julian had recorded before even knowing what he was going to do with it. And it was then, lying on these uncomfortable coal pillows, when our conversation about volcanoes began—and also where you could see the nucleus of a project that Julian will install at Palais de Tokyo in October 2024.

Before our lie-down/chat Julian had told me that in his mind the Fagradalsfjall in Iceland felt feminine and the Erta Ale in Ethiopia masculine. Being new to this subject matter I asked the obvious beginner’s question:

ADRIANO SACK: What does that mean?

JULIAN CHARRIÈRE: The Fagradalsfjall, or at least her voice, struck me as tender, and more importantly, it had a force that was much more profound. That reminded me of my mother and of many other women in my life. And the Erta Ale had a more aggressive edge, which was perhaps also due to the surrounding setting of a warzone, with armed people around. And then his voice was more menacing, a quality I perceived as warlike and militaristic. I liked the idea of presenting these two extremes in one room. The project is ongoing, since I am now recording the voices of multiple volcanoes around the world. I remain fascinated by their lifeworlds—liminal places where the realms hidden beneath the crust crest reality. Where the facts come to the fore that we are essentially balancing on a fireball. Though frightening, it is a fact that too remains buried in our psyches, kept away from our daily lives. In this sense, volcanoes act as ambassadors of the underworld, but maybe also of the subconscious. As you yourself know, when you stand on a volcano or when you live on the slopes of a mountain like Etna, there’s this powerful presence—you feel as though it is not an object, but a living thing. An agent who can shape our lives, as threatening as she is giving.

When Etna erupts, its fissures deepen, catalyzing lava flows in lower elevations and forming cinder cones in higher elevations. Somewhere in between the two, Charrière and Sack walk the ashy slopes of the volcano.

While I was sitting in the Unimog I wondered what Mount Etna would be willing to give this day. We had barely started our hike when we saw a smoke ring above one of the craters. “That does not happen too often,” said Vincenzo, our guide, and we took this as a good omen. Joining us was the Sicilian photographer Roselena Ramistella, who did the legendary cover of Sicilian fisherman in traditional work gear on their boat for Uomo. It was an unusual cover for a fashion magazine, and what was even more interesting and actually quite moving, these men not only fish sardines but are saviors for the forlorn humans who risk their lives on a perilous oceanic journey towards better lives—and the promise of a wealthy yet often almost unreachable Europe. She is a fierce and funny woman, dedicated to her work and seemingly not intimidated by anything. After seeing the first of three craters—the one in the Northeast, deep, full of mineral murals, hissing gasses, and endless drama—she sighed: “It is impossible to capture that on a picture.”

Which is why this won’t be a lengthy description of our trip. We urinated on the volcanic ashes while staring at the Mediterranean Sea far below. We inhaled far too much sulfuric gasses, heard a seismic orchestra rising from the deep, saw even more smoke rings in the blue sky, and witnessed volcanic steam and clouds merging into an almost baroque image. We also gazed at remains of the crater “Spagnola,” named after a Spanish girl that fell into it, posed for the camera in front of gigantic acid yellow stones, listened to Vincenzo’s stories about growing up on the mountain—his grandfather was one of the first Sicilian ski instructors. We saw colorful landscapes of surreal beauty, full of toxic gasses that are blown out of the stones at lethal temperatures. We saw steaming cracks in the mountain, which, according to Vincenzo, were growing every day and would most likely reshape the mountain again. Blame it on being at 3500 meters above sea level for hours or on the mix of icy winds and merciless sun or on my inclination towards being overwhelmed, but even a day and a very sound sleep after, I cannot help but say: We saw and heard hell—and it was awesome.

On our descent, the euphoria dissipated, and our knees started to complain. This was when we started our actual interview.

Unlike the man overlooking the precipice in Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Charrière's hair (and perhaps even Sack's) gleams, as volcanic ash has purifying qualities.

AS: What was your first volcano?

JC: Active or inactive?

AS: The first encounter.

JC: As a kid I went to Auvergne with my family. I must have been eight years old. We went to see all the volcanoes in that region including the one you know from the Volvic Water bottle. It left an indelible mark in my memory. As a kid, you expect a mountain to have a peak, a caricature image of what a mountain should look like. Being from Switzerland, this idea is engraved in your mind. But with an old, inactive volcano, you climb it, only to eventually descend into what would have been the crater, but which is now a valley—a negative imprint of a mountain.

The second volcano that came to inform my worldview and thus also my art practice was Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland. After erupting in 2010 and expunging a vast cloud of ash, it effectively shut down air traffic in Europe. At the time, I was in my last year as a student at Olafur Eliasson’s Institute for Spatial Experiments, and had a trip planned to Iceland. It was the first time a geological entity forced me to postpone my plans! In Western Europe, many people live in urban comfort, insulated from the natural world. Yet this separation has made us falsely believe we have mastered such forces. As we face climate change and global warming, reality becomes more erratic. We aren’t hermetically sealed off from the uncertainty of the world—its right here with us, becoming more slippery by the day.

Once the cloud of ash allowed us to enter, what followed was a ten-day hike through the Icelandic highlands. Andreas Greiner, Julius von Bismarck [two friends, fellow artists, and sometimes collaborators of Julian], and myself pushed on another 80-kilometer to the then newly born volcano. When we arrived, we were greeted by one of the most incredible sights I have had the planetary privilege to witness. Everything was covered with snow, with the emergent mountain having breached the frozen crust of a massive glacier. As we began our ascension through a thick cloud, only a few meters were visible ahead of us. The crater itself was a cauldron, boiling hot, and producing giant columns of steam with black waterfalls pouring into it. It was both primordial and sublime, as if we had been flung through the folds of time to the birthplace of something truly cosmic— we vanished into the magnitude of its presence while witnessing these intense telluric forces. This is when you understand what raw power truly is, and how microscopic we are in turn. It was a close encounter with something entirely different, something too hot to handle or even comprehend—and on our way down, I remember, the soles of our boots had begun to melt.

AS: Were you afraid?

JC: Not afraid for our lives, though the possibility of becoming lost in an icy cloud on a newborn volcano was a recipe for a terrible night. Yet that potential also made us alive and alert. Part of my practice deals with entering these kind of “eye of the storm” nodal points, or needle points, that like a compass allow us to navigate the unknown. In this case it was a place where the inner life of Earth came to the surface, with a message of how little us surface-dwellers truly understand. That kind of disorientation can be very productive, which is why many of my projects play with scale and perception. By dislodging our expectations, we can begin to relearn how to inhabit the world. It is a reforging out of the world and your body and the sensory apparatus which make it into a whole. Iceland is one such re-calibrator, whereby the lack of landmarks evades your sense of orientation—it is a landscape that likes you to be lost.

AS: When you were in Iceland did you already know where your work in general was heading?

JC: I had already had a couple of exhibitions in Zürich and Berlin, among others, so, there was a broad direction. And while this has evolved a lot in the meantime, I knew from early on that our changing ideas of “landscape” would play a significant role. As well as our perception as a species, which is clearly limited, yet we often pretend the world exists precisely as we perceive it. This is a world that contains multitudes, emerging differently based on the senses of each organism that traverses it. Our Earth exists as Earths upon Earths, all the way down, a whole stratum of experiences. The ability to look through such different perspectives is something I have to partly thank Olafur for. He brought cooks, break-dancers, architects, quantum physicists, and so on, to his Institut für Raumexperimente. Each of their lenses was connected to their specific disciplines, but together it created a compound eye. I believe we should do the same but expand it beyond our species. We should learn to think like a pigeon or a whale. How does one think like a river delta, or a volcano?

Julian Charrière, And Beneath It All Flows Liquid Fire, 2019 (copyright the artist: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany)

AS: At some point you started recording the sound of volcanoes. Why?

JC: After Iceland, I became obsessed with volcanoes. Largely because of their magical properties. Once inside, you feel as though you have entered a time portal where different dimensions abound. At the same time, the volcano is a spokesperson, a kind of geological ambassador, for an underground that we depend upon for stability. It screams, it breathes, it acts. It frightens, it threatens, it gives birth. It may cast a portending shadow, yet it is also lifegiving, fertilizing the surrounding land with its ashes.

Shortly after Iceland, I travelled to a volcanic ridge in Ethiopia, home to one of only five lava lakes currently in existence. Reaching it, I was imbued with a Jules Verne feeling that lava reaches all the way down to the core of the Earth. I know that’s not really true, and that there are lava chambers, but you do understand why people once thought so. That this was a door to hell itself; to something infernal. It is definitely not human-friendly—we got sulfur intoxication for staying too long, and the heat was so intense it made our hair stand up. This was the moment I began recording the voice of the Earth.

AS: Like Andy Warhol who always recorded what people were saying. But you replaced socialites with nature.

JC: Exactly. Both sounds you can hear with your ears, but there is also infrasonic information—too low and too slow for us to grasp. In my work, I try to bring such intangible phenomena into the realm of our senses and create artworks that hint at non-human scales and beyond-human worlds. For instance, how a bird can sense an earthquake before our seismographs do. Every animal has a different sensorial perception of the world, and we seldom acknowledge that. Think about the oil platforms in the ocean: the whales are washing onto the shore because they are overwhelmed by the sounds of our drillings. While we do not consciously seek to do harm, the fact that we cannot grasp the myriad consequences of our actions ensures we will. Art is a tool for this—for expanding our perceptions.

For the presentation at Palais de Tokyo in October, I wanted to explore this idea of restaging what we think of as objects, albeit planetary mass objects, as subjects. To build a parliament with and for volcanoes. Especially since the physiology of a volcano is already somehow a vocal organ, where chambers expand and contract, with tremors pushing gases through their mineral bodies. It is not so different than how we produce sound, just at a different scale and velocity, and at radically more intense decibels. I want to give these different vocalizations their due, to bring a choir together, to find harmony. It can be unsettling because we are not used to these frequencies—it will be both meditative and unsettling at once.

AS: People used to be obsessed with the communication of whales. They recorded their songs and deciphered them, and ultimately, we had to admit we are deaf. Do you understand what the volcanoes are saying?

Of course not. But I listen very carefully. And maybe we will never be able to truly understand, but that is a strength, not a limitation. A friend of mine, David Gruber, tries, for instance, to decipher the communication of sperm whales. They are mammals, so they might be a little closer to us than a volcano or a mosquito. It’s unlikely that we will be able to speak fluent whale but understanding the Umwelt of another organism allows us to think about how our reality is constructed. Obviously, the point is to learn that we can’t step out of our human existence. But we can maybe open it up a bit.

AS: Jumping back to the lava lake for a second. Are you familiar with these accounts of astronauts who saw earth as a fragile blue planet, and it totally changed their perspective? Did you see the world differently after seeing the lava lake, after seeing hell just below us? We build our civilization on a fire ball with a little crust. What does that mean?

You learn how small we are on a raw and emotional level. Seeing rivers of incandescent rocks, the solidity of the Earth flowing like water, you understand our insignificance. When you witness a landscape being born, it shows you where you stand. Gravitating on our anthropocentric orbits, we have come to worship the individual. But next to a volcano, you don’t event exist.

Mosses, lichens, grasses, and junipers grow on the mountain at elevations of up to 2,500 meters. Past that is the point of no return, void of vegetation yet routinely visited by snow.

Yet the existence of Julian Charrière is hard to deny. When he and Julius von Bismarck published a film in 2018 of what looked like explosions of natural monuments in the desert of Utah, TV stations reported about an attack on America. In fact, the artists had built imitations of actual rocks that they blew up in Mexico’s desert. They published what looked like amateur videos online, but also showed immaculate large-format photographs of the explosions at their Exhibition “I’m afraid I have to ask you to leave” at Kunstpalais Erlangen. It was a joke in the era of fake news but also a clever game with perceptions and perspectives and therefore guiding for the way this artist operates.

Nothing is ever what it seems with him, or not only what it seems. He investigates subject matters from different standpoints and transforms them into various works in various media. He travelled to the Bikini Atoll and to Semipalatinsk nuclear testing site in the former Soviet Union, creating photographs that were exposed to radioactivity which visualize the still vital danger of these long abandoned places and yet are strikingly elegant objects. A palm oil plantation in Indonesia becomes the location for movie, and its product (the palm oil) is the liquid in his elegant lava lamps that quote both hallucinogenic bliss and minimal art.

There is an ambiguity in his practice that feels healthy in a cultural climate that yearns for clear worldviews. On the other hand, the images of him on top of arctic icebergs are instantly iconic like a perfectly crafted pop song. His works have been shown at Centre Pompidou, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, and the Reykjavik Art Museum, among many others. When he told me about his travel and exhibition plans for the next months, my head started to spin—though he claimed he had already cleared his schedule.

AS: You have talked about humbling experiences. On the other hand, as a successful artist, the world has to gravitate around you, you must think your work has a meaning. There is this contradiction of understanding how small you are, and yet making yourself as big as possible. How does that work?

JC: You need to apply humility while exploring the history of a planet. I try to translate these experiences and make them accessible. In my view, art should give the public the opportunity to see the world through different eyes. It is not that my eyes are better than anyone else’s, but that part of my project is to act as conduit for other subjectivities—or to places where the stable ground gives way.
And the more your art touches people the more they can take this step.

AS: To touch people is an interesting phrase. Your work tends to be thought-through and have multiple layers and yet it has a very basic power. Like the bass in your stomach in a club. And it is almost always strikingly beautiful.

JC: Beauty is such a subjective thing…

AS: It’s not. Beauty is mathematic.

JC: You think so?

AS: Traditionally, yes. A beautiful face or palazzo is the result of proportions which are based on numbers even if the result seems to be mesmerizing in an otherworldly fashion. And in your work, the burning fountain, the palm oil plantation, the crystallized plants, and the half-destroyed photos from radioactivity have a kind of beauty—even if they’re tainted or destroyed.

JC: I like that, since a lot of my work is about ugly topics. If you want to talk about oil drilling in the North Sea, we all know the facts. But beauty can be a tool for drawing the viewer in, a lure. A palm oil plantation is conceptually horrible, but when you see it, it’s stunning. Art can dare you to look at the things you would otherwise avert your gaze from.

Charrière's practice is equally inspired by land artists and the ecological object-oriented ontology of Timothy Morton.

AS: I always thought your work is about how humans and nature interact, collide, and pervert each other. Your installation for Palais de Tokyo will be different. It merely translates the sounds of volcanoes into something that can be experienced. Is that a different approach?

JC: I investigate places of friction. How our species rubs up against something else—which is deemed an Other. Volcanoes are places of friction because they interact with civilization in a brutal way. But the artwork isn’t. We tend to suppress the voice of nature, place ourselves at the center, demoting the rest of the world to “surroundings.” We don’t have that privilege with the volcano, and so we need to recalibrate. These entities are so powerful that their voice cannot be ignored. The idea is to personify them, so people can properly engage with these entities. Therefore, there’ll also be a livestream from actual observation stations in the installation, modulating the soundtrack according to real time seismic activities.

AS: The idea of making a physical experience out of sound recordings reminds me of your biographical links to nightlife: you presented your movie An Invitation to Disappear with a soundtrack by Inland at Berghain. Even your plant installation at Langen Foundation felt related to nightlife. It was like an unknown, slightly mysterious, and potentially dangerous realm.

JC: Mysterious and uncanny. Club culture shaped the way I see the world and also my art practice. There are moments on the dancefloor when your individuality melts away and you merge with your surroundings. Moments when I was not sure if my body marked the limits of my world and my perception. Ecstatic experiences after being awake for 48 hours—really intense journeys. The ritual of that and the shamanistic togetherness. Standing outside a club is almost like approaching a volcano. You feel the pressure pushing against the windows and walls. Maybe that’s why, again and again, I am drawn to using stroboscopes, smoke machines, and subwoofers in the spaces I create. I’m effectively transferring the tools and totems of nightlife into the white cube.

AS: I believe there are two kinds of partygoers. The first group parties because it is part of being young, the other is more committed and searches for the experience of losing themselves. Can you touch people as an artist in the same way a legendary club night does?

JC: Music touches you more directly because sound affects the body. It’s less intellectualized than the gaze or reading. But I try to create these massive, experience-driven events. My installation for Palais de Tokyo will be one of those. Obviously, there is a conceptual layer, but basically you enter a speaker. You are in a space turned into a speaker. That will have a striking effect in the way you sense the space.

Julian Charrière, Vertigo, Installation View, Dittrich & Schlechtriem, Berlin, Germany, 2021 (copyright the artist; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany, Photo by Jens Ziehe)

AS: You mentioned that your work touches upon problematic and political subjects. Exploitations of resources, destruction of the earth. Are you a political artist?

JC: Everything an artist does is political. You can be more acutely or more abstractly political. I believe my art is strongly political without being…

AS: Preachy?

JC: Sometimes you need to preach, too.

AS: What was the most preachy thing you have done?

JC: Maybe the solar container in front of the Langen Foundation because I demonstrated that there are other ways to power a museum. Most of them are still powered by fossil fuel. And there is an insistence to keep artworks in super controlled climates, even when it is not required. I understand that we want to preserve a Titian, but mostly it is unnecessary energy expenditure. The solar container is a comment on the weakness of the system. And it has a second life now in Namibia, where it powers a wildlife conservation station that is making efforts to preserve the black rhino. Nothing of the subjects I address is absolutely new or unknown, but often encompass some element or history which has been buried, whether in memory or administratively, by governments or companies who would prefer they remain unearthed. We all know palm oil is bad, for instance. But to experience the rave party at the plantation is a different moment. It is strange, a new materiality with which the viewer can engage, rather than consume. It is different in that sense from conventional cinema, which is designed for you to go to a cinema to consume. You go to a museum to be unsettled; to question. It is a last outpost where people cannot always understand what they are looking at.

AS: Where did the humor go? If you think about the colored pigeons in Venice or the blown up tiny hills that you and Julius von Bismarck made look like mountains that created a little media scandal. Where did this kind of pranking attitude go? Are you a grown-up now?

JC: Some of the work might [be]. At the Langen Foundation there was a lot of humor. Sticking your head [on] a lump of coal is a funny act.

AS: What’s funny about it?

JC: It is like a cartoon. It’s like climbing an iceberg and trying to melt it down with a blowtorch.

Julian Charrière, making of Stone Speakers, 2024 (copyright of the artist: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany, Photo by Roselena Ramistella)

AS: Is there something weirdly heroic about your persona as an artist? Are you a danger-seeker?

JC: Perhaps I am a danger-seeker, but I don’t view my art as heroic. I like to put myself into situations where I might lose control, because normally I am a control-freak. That might be why I go too far into atomic test sites or break into abandoned oil rigs. I think rather of the artist persona as a filter, a co-producer of reality, writing reality as we produce the works.

So are authors. Or musicians. Just look at how cinema has affected our sense of what is real or normative. We might think of it totally differently if Hollywood did not churn out films the way it does. I am not saying that I am Hollywood but I participate in the production of imagery, which enter the realm of cultural production. Art is a vessel that helps people to see, unsee, resee. [To be] triggered and surprised.

But back to heroism, for me it is more about bringing stories from the fringes, the outskirts, and borderlands. Something floating in our minds, yet almost forgotten. It is important that someone goes to these places and brings forth new stories. I decided to be one of these people. The idea of touching the world is not heroic but human. Going into a palm oil plantation is not that complicated or dangerous. Just nobody does it. Also, I am not into dark tourism, like visiting fucked up places. That is not the point, nor is the remoteness of the sites. Rather I am intrigued by spaces that have been formed, reversed, and distracted by our species. Places that because of us don’t exist anymore. The Arctic, for example, no longer exists. It has all these images anchored in our collective consciousness, starving polar bears, melting ice caps, Mike Horn—what is it in the end? I am trying to find an oblique way to describe it.

AS: When we talked about Towards No Earthly Pole, that project had so many layers of history and references: the race to the South Pole, Frank Hurley’s cinematographic photos of icebergs, Charles Darwin, a Russian explorer ship, searchlights at the end of the world. Is your volcano project equally loaded?

JC: Not in terms of iconography. Because it is more of a sound piece. But obviously there is a huge history of volcanoes and volcanism. Loaded mountains that have inspired mythology as much as science for some 2000 years, coloring how we describe their world, connecting us to hell and to deities. But that perceived supernaturality is not supernatural, it just surpasses our ability to comprehend. The natural world is much more complex than anything we will ever be able to make sense of. The multidimensionality has not been explored, and so I want to broadcast that supernaturality into the museum. For instance, how a glacier is a rock formation, since ice has a crystalline structure. It is a pile of rocks moving—we hear it, we see it calving. As is the volcano. It gives you a glimpse into something that is normally opaque or forbidden, which is what draws me to both.

AS: You created something like a time machine yourself. An hourglass filled with tar. Which theoretically is a very slow moving liquid. Has it dropped already?

JC: No (laughs).

Julian Charrière, Aspen - First Light, 2016 (copyright the artist; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany)

After sliding and jumping down the mountainside covered with loose lava stones, we got into the region of Etna where the first pioneer plant grows: a stunning flat cactus that blossoms purple in spring but at this time of the year there is only some white material in the center and some rather nasty spines around that. They form little, slightly rounded fields which cover the black surface. It’s the first sign of what we consider life after the stunning yet lifeless queendom on top of the mountain. A little further down, there was even a flock of sheep grazing the first real plants and a strangely shy white dog that was supposed to protect them but just meekly walked away. We were only 90 minutes away from the craters yet they already became a distant dream.

AS: You mentioned Invitation to Disappear a film about a palm oil plantation that seemed to be on fire. Why did you want to burn it?

JC: It is a multilayered project about a truly postcolonial landscape, drawing also on the complicated legacy of the West conceptualizing the jungle as “wild” to begin with. Acres and acres of primordial rainforest are burnt down to clear the land needed to plant the lush oil palms.The film An Invitation to Disappear is set on a Southeast Asian palm oil plantation. My original intention travelling to Indonesia was to explore the Mount Tambora volcano, but to get there you have to drive through immense plantations—so vast the sun rises and sets, all while you are still journeying through their labyrinthian interior. At first as a Westerner, you cannot get rid of the feeling of being in a jungle, but then you realize that the forest follows a grid of mathematical order, home exclusively to oil palms. A domestication of the jungle, all in the name of making our own lives sweeter and softer through commercial goods and products. In that sense, the monocultures are an oil spill, but which pools in our foods and shampoos, and so also in our bodies.

At the same time, I felt like the monocultures were literally projecting the grid of modernity into the forest, reducing it to a garden of commercialized delights. If this grid represents the capitalistic agenda, how could we then symbolically uproot it? This is how the idea of the rave was born, bringing the subcultures of the city deep into the plantation.

I took my experience with nightlife and orchestrated this rave-like situation with surreal lighting and a techno soundtrack composed by Inland for the occasion. But there are no people, rather it was an act of delivering back to the land the unruliness we stole from it. The original translation of jungle is chaos. Symbolically, I gave the chaos back to the palms.

Julian Charrière, An Invitation To Disappear-Sabah, 2018 (copyright the artist: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany)

AS: For your show at the Langen Foundation you wanted to burn the fields around the museum. Are you in your fire phase?

JC: Fire and ice. In a strange way fire has become some sort of secret or taboo in our world. Yet fire is what made us become human beings. Without fire we wouldn’t have our brain…

AS: At least not that big.

JC: We might still be monkeys. But with industrialization, fire became hidden: in factories, power plants, the engines of cars. It drives our world, out of view. When we began using fossil resources to produce energy, we started to destroy the past, effectively burning the remnants of long-dead biomes.

But from a geological standpoint, we are burning something that was created through sunlight. Coal and oil—once plant life, in essence, it’s fossilized sunlight. I like this thought. There is this professor and fire ecologist Stephen Pyne who argues that we live in a Pyrocene: an era which is dependent on fire. It is a perverse relationship, both fearful and addicted.

The film Controlled Burn is about this ignition—showing reversing fireworks about extractive architectures, from deep sea oil rigs to open pit mines and cooling towers of coal-fired power plants. The implosions speak both to our terraforming and the energy released by our species, but also to something more cosmic. It looks at the machinery of deep time, which made it possible for Carboniferous biomes to compress to oil and coal. In the end, it is all about the plants—their spirits haunt our industrialized world. There were no fires on Earth to speak of, until they came along. They were the fuel for the primordial fire then [just] as they are our fuel now.

Julian Charrière, Controlled Burn | Open-Pit Mine G.4, 2023 (copyright the artist: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany)

When we got close to the basecamp, we saw a lava stream from 2002. There were dead white trees in the middle of the stones that had been slowly waltzing down the hill back then. The simple fact that they were still there seemed absurd given that the temperature of semi-liquid lava is around 800 degrees Celsius. You would expect every tree to burn and disappear within minutes. But above the lava stream there were so much sulfur and carbon dioxide gasses that they pushed away all oxygen. And without oxygen nothing can burn, no matter how hot. Even if it was simple physics, the dead white trees seemed like a monument of a monumental catastrophe—and a reminder that life and death are not that easily distinguishable.

AS: When did your artistic work bring close to death?

JC: On two trips. The first one was in a war zone between Eritrea, Somalia, and Ethiopia. I went there because there was a continental crack that went 200 meters wide and 200 meters deep. It is known as the birth of a new ocean. The rift continued to the Red Sea which one day will flood this depression. I wanted to make an earthwork that symbolically prevented the birth of this new ocean, by binding both continental plates with a cable. Which did not work out in the end for obvious and other reasons. It was a complicated trip which brought us to the verge of what human beings can endure and at some point, people whose language we did not speak were pointing guns at us. The second time was at the Bikini Atoll and Nadim [Samman, curator and critic who accompanied Julian on this trip] had a panic attack at 60 meters deep. He could have shot up and would have died. We had to decide: Are we going up with him or let him go up alone? Luckily he calmed down at 40 meters.

AS: Did he remember afterwards?

JC: Not the freak out.

AS: Did you ask yourself after that: Is it really worth it?

JC: Yes. From then on, we did 70 meters deep every day.