Julian Charrière
Sun Sets in Stone | Mariopteris - Esmeraldas 31.0s
2024

In the artwork Sun Sets in Stone Julian Charrière collapses both time and space, bridging a deep time that makes uncertain the threshold between the organic and geological, living and fossil. The artwork marks the continuation of the artist’s experiments with analogue double exposure photography, an unpredictable process where the final image is subject to accident rather than the will of the photographer. A medium format analogue camera is used that brings together two subjects, in this case an Ecuadorian cloud forest and a material trace from the Carboniferous period, layered onto a single black and white negative – a snapshot of biomes both past and present. To realize this, Charrière first surveyed the undergrowth of a Western Andean Cloud Forest, overgrown with tree ferns, orchids and bromeliads. A key biodiversity hotspot in Ecuador, it marks a site both biologically rich and deeply threatened by resource extraction, climate change and the global agro-industrial complex. On the same film negative, the artist then documented a Carboniferous era fossil, found in the geological collection of the Natural History Museum in Berlin. Folding the forest of the present into the remains of a past primordial realm, Sun Sets in Stone forges a panchronic ecosystem of its own, which while growing 350 million years apart, in the organic synapsis of planet Earth remain inextricably linked.