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Future Fossil Spaces

Julian Charrière - Future Fossil Spaces
First monograph.
Whether creating innovative topographies of his native country and adopted homeland using bacteria in constant evolution, or Babel-like towers that are gradually coated with organic motifs obtained through decomposition of samples taken from nine great rivers of the world, Julian Charrière studies the effect of time, its relationship with space and matter, and the various ways we perceive it. What he calls “the geology of History”
“Future Fossil Spaces”, the exhibition devised for the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne which is the occasion for this book, brings together works for which Julian Charrière traveled to Iceland, Kazakhstan, the Atacama Desert (Chile) and Argentina. The exhibition title evokes The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories, the result of an expedition carried out in 2013 in which the artist climbed an iceberg in the Arctic Ocean and attempted to melt the ice under his feet using a blowtorch for over eight hours. The fossils mentioned in the title do not refer to traces of animal or plant life found in rocks, but to the Latin etymology of the word, which translates literally as “obtained from digging”, the action of the artist consisting therefore in proposing, in the present of the exhibition space, works that are in dialectical tension between the two arrows of time, one pointing to the past and the other towards the future.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne, from October 2014 to january 2015.
Julian Charrière (born 1987 in Morges, Switzerland) is a French-Swiss artist living and working in Berlin. He studied at ECAV (École cantonale d'art du Valais) and at the Institut für Raumexperimente in Berlin, under the guidance of Olafur Eliasson. Charrière explores ideas of nature and its transformation over deep ecological as well as human historical time. Addressing pressing matters of ecological concern, his work frequently stems from fieldwork in remote locations with acute geophysical identities, such as volcanoes, ice fields, oil palm plantations, and undersea and radioactive sites. An ongoing reflection upon the mythos and politics of exploration in a globalized age is central to his practice. Working across media and conceptual paradigms, Charrière frequently collaborates with composers, scientists, engineers, art historians, and philosophers. His work often provokes, inviting critical reflection upon cultural traditions of perceiving, representing, and engaging with the natural world.
Edited by Nicole Schweizer.
Texts by Amelia Barikin, Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel, Nadim Julien Samman, Nicole Schweizer.
 
published in December 2014
bilingual edition (English / French)
16,5 x 23,5 cm (hardcover)
204 pages (ill.)
 
ISBN : 978-88-6749-106-3
EAN : 9788867491063
 
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