Julian Charrière
Behind Each Fire, A Ghost

In Behind Each Fire, A Ghost, Julian Charrière poetically engages with geological, industrial, and cultural processes, shedding light on the dynamic interplay between nature and humanity. The works, created between 2016 and 2024, critically reflect on the material manifestations of energy and the traces left by our extractivist society.

In the video installation And Beneath It All Flows Liquid Fire (2019), Charrière reinterprets the classical iconography of the fountain by introducing its opposing element, fire—a symbol of both destruction and the genesis of civilization. The result is a hypnotic monument to our fossil-driven society.

In the photographic series Buried Sunshines Burn (2023), Charrière reflects on the history of California’s oil fields, whose discovery in the late 19th century transformed the region into an industrial metropolis. The heliographs, produced with bitumen sourced from Los Angeles tar pits, evoke the psychedelic shimmer of California’s counterculture while mirroring the toxic allure of fossil fuels, which have profoundly shaped modern society.

The sculpture series Metamorphism (2016) features meteorite-like stones created by melting down computer technology such as hard drives, circuit boards, and processors into an artificial lava. As a reversal of the typical resource extraction process, these sculptures highlight the material flows of our society and the anthropogenic traces embedded in the planet’s geological layers.

Sun Sets in Stone (2024) unites images of an Ecuadorian cloud forest with fossil relics from the Carboniferous period, bridging the present with a prehistoric past. Through analog double exposure, two biomes separated by millions of years are merged into a single image. The piezographs, printed with coal pigments, create a spectral link between an ecosystem threatened by exploitation and anthropogenic climate change and the photosynthetic origins of fossil fuels.