Julian Charrière
Midnight Zone
2024

The new film and sculptural installation Midnight Zone is a dive through the ocean’s depths, a realm still largely uncharted. Through nightly dives, Charrière explores the deep-sea areas around the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. The artist invites viewers to sink into the “Midnight Zone,” one to four thousand meters below, guided by a fresnel lens. As the lens sinks into total darkness, Charrière highlights an ecosystem at risk from deep-sea mining. At these depths, the sculpture embodies humanity’s connection to Earth, a watery world defying human boundaries. The artwork’s journey ends in the Clipperton Fracture Zone, a Pacific seabed home to biodiversity and rare metals crucial for clean technologies and under immediate threat of mining. Midnight Zone highlights the delicate balance between a sustainable future and the potential destruction of marine habitats. With all sea layers linked by food chains, energy flows, and currents, disturbance here could severely impact other ecosystems—including the oceans’ role as vital carbon sinks. The sculpture’s arrival in this fracture zone reflects on world waters as both otherworldly and sites of political tension. As mining threatens these domains, Charrière urges us to see oceanic zones not as barren, but as essential parts of planetary machinery that, while vast beyond understanding, we can still protect. Through new aesthetics, he invites viewers to shift perspective and, leaving familiar marine visuals behind, journey ever deeper into what Freud described as the Oceanic Feeling—a shared sense of eternity between our unconscious and the deep sea.