Julian Charrière

On The Edge, 2016

Sound installation, self-generated piece, computer software, sound samples.

Sound design: Constantin Engelmann

In Julian Charrière's video installations, sound has always played an important role. With On The Edge, his first purely sonic work, he leaves us with him, and mental images emerge from our experiences, our fears too. The piece is a succession, a random interweaving of countdowns, entrusted to software operating on the principle of the Fibonacci spiral. The sounds are taken from both historical documents (from NASA and the US military) and science-fiction films. Don't the imaginations of scientists and those of authors and scriptwriters feed off each other in a never-ending race?

On The Edge was conceived at a time when the young artist was developing a series of works around nuclear testing, first visiting the Soviet test site of Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, in 2014, then the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in 2015, the scene of explosions in the US program between 1946 and 1958.

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Julian Charrière

Born in Morges in 1987

Lives and works in Berlin

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Julian Charrière continued his studies in Berlin at the Ecole cantonale d'art du Valais. He was a member of the first class of the short-lived Institut für Raumexperimente (spatial experiments), launched by Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson in conjunction with the Berlin University of the Arts.

Alone, but also in duet with Julius Bismark or with the Numen collective (all students of Olafur Eliasson), he never ceases to explore the long-term relationship between humanity and the environment. The planet is his territory, his material.

From the works that made his name - whether climbing an Icelandic glacier to melt the ice with a blowtorch(The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories, 2013) or accumulating various sections of core samples from geological studies and Berlin sidewalks in long snakes(On The Sidewalk, 2013) - to recent works focusing on the materials we use as energy (coal, oil, palm oil, sunlight...). One of the highlights of the Art Basel Parcours in June 2023 was the explosive film Controlled Burn, made of imploding fireworks.

In Valais, in 2018, An Invitation to Disappear was exhibited at the Mauvoisin dam. Julian Charrière's photographs were a reminder that the greenhouse gas emissions produced by Indonesia's gigantic palm plantations are causing climate-warming greenhouse gases to melt alpine glaciers.