Our New Relationship with Fire
Since autumn 2022, the Langen Foundation, a renowned address for art exhibitions on the grounds of the former NATO missile station near Neuss, takes a closer look at our warming planet: Julian Charrière, an artist for whom nature and its transformation is the basis of his work, has come on board. In his exhibition “Controlled Burn”, he explores in multimedia form - whether as film, photography, sculpture or opulent installation - the ambivalent fascination with fire: as a symbol of destruction and genesis. A conversation with the artist about his work, his approach to the world and the sovereignty of nature.
Julian Charrière, And Beneath It All Flows Liquid Fire, 2019 Installation View, Towards No Earthly Pole Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Switzerland Copyright the artist; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany. Photo: Jens Ziehe
Julian, how would you characterise the current relationship between humans and nature?
In one word: tricky. When scientists speak of “frightening”, or the UN Secretary General of “hell” and “apocalypse”, you know that dramatising the notion of nature is no longer the prerogative of art alone. This also means a new recognition of nature as a valuable counterpart and as a necessarily semi-autonomous sphere that demands of us - the people and children of industrial modernity - a new diplomacy or willingness to co-exist. This also requires a new sensitivity for the complexity and essence of what this concept of “nature” actually means. I would like to contribute to this new sensitivity with new images conveying multi-layered but clear content.
How do you look at the world as an artist - for example, when you are travelling for your work?
Travelling is always an exploration and an exposure - but always also a kind of “reconstellation”, if you take it seriously. You see how our normality is connected to distant places and that our truth also lies in precisely these places, these edges of our world. But we also see that the smouldering fire of modernity, which we Westerners have spread all over the world, is coming to us now. The carpet is also beginning to burn in our country, and we are seeing how our “comfort zones” are slowly beginning to smoulder.
„Science stimulates artistic and cultural discourses immensely - and vice versa.“
Julian Charrière, Pure Waste, 2021 Video Still Copyright the artist; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany
You often conduct field research for your work. How do you go about it? What happens exactly?
There is no single method of artistic research. But I can say what is important to me. One is the risk of exposure. Of course, I always take inspiration from my preliminary research to the places I visit. But before it goes to conception or production, the place has to speak first. I visit places to see and hear what they have to say - it is in a way the continuation of my reading. Then it is also important to me that there is an intercultural and interdisciplinary dialogue between my own artistically oriented research and the scientific, cultural research and discourses. Therefore, I often participate in existing research projects or I collaborate with them. And in the process I also become something of a medium, a translator.
Don’t you also need very extensive scientific knowledge for your work? And doesn’t this possibly stand in the way of an artistic and an “uninhibited” approach?
It’s an old saying that art and knowledge must always maintain a constructive tension. But if I always knew exactly what was happening in my work, my art would probably no longer be art. The Max Planck Institute, for example, has been cooperating with the House of World Cultures since 2013 on the Anthropocene, the age of man - and that’s only because art plays a role in the real redefinition of “hard” knowledge and of research methods in general. On the other hand, we owe the impulse to contemplate the Anthropocene, and thus to look deeper, to geology. Science stimulates artistic and cultural discourses immensely - and vice versa.
What do you think is the task of art? Does art have a task at all?
Certainly it is a difficult, even problematic thing to put art at the service of a cause, even of a group. But of course the artistic sphere has a connection with, for example, the cultural, social or political spheres. What seems special and interesting to me about the present is that questions of sovereignty - in every respect - are being renegotiated. This is what the discourse on the Anthropocene is about: that the planet - in geological terms - is losing its old “sovereignty”. And with it nature - and ultimately also man. I think it is important to recognise again that animals, rivers, trees, even volcanoes should have their own rights and cultural roles. And that the various sovereignties of nature are not to be misunderstood as antithetical to “us humans”. Therefore, in my opinion, art should also constitute work with and on the corresponding new sovereignties.
“Fire has been strangely
banished from our public spaces”
Julian Charrière
“Controlled Burn” at the Langen Foundation in Neuss is your most extensive exhibition to date. What role does fire play here? What fascinates you about it?
We are all concerned with fire by now, and it has become a tiresome protagonist of the 8 pm news. But of course it also has cultural, aesthetic and geo-cultural meanings that go beyond forest fires and mega-fires. My exhibition is primarily about archetypal transformation and the connection between destruction and creation. I have long been fascinated by volcanoes and their expressive power and meaning. I am also interested in the whole scope of the figure of combustion - on which our modernity is built, after all. Our everyday lives are defined - and made possible - by constant combustion at the edges of our field of vision or hidden in the black boxes we call engines, furnaces or batteries. Fire has been strangely banished from our public spaces - and at the same time it is omnipresent. But one question can also be how all this is connected: Volcanoes, natural fires, aesthetics of fire, geocultures of fire and the role of combustion as the basis of modernity.
A broad field ...
Yes, it is. In any case, it seems to me that a reflection and reinterpretation of the complex and ambivalent relationship between man, planet and fire is indicated. Without fire and a new relationship to fire, there will be no future.•
The exhibition „Controlled Burn“ at the Langen Foundation in Neuss can be seen until 26 August 2023.
Julian Charrière, Controlled Burn, 2022 Copyright the artist; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany
about Julian Charrière
Julian Charrière (born 1987 in Morges, Switzerland) studied art at the Swiss École cantonale d‘art du Valais and at the Institute for Spatial Experiments at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. He particularly explores critical sites of ecological change in his works, which combine art, science and contemporary issues in anthropology. Charrière‘s work has been shown in solo exhibitions at numerous international institutions, including the Parasol Unit Foundation, London (2015), the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne (2014), and currently at SFMOMA, San Franciso, until 14 May 2023. Charrière has also been represented at important exhibitions such as the recent 59th Biennale di Venezia, Collateral Events (2022) and the 16th Biennale de Lyon (2022). The artist lives in Berlin.
Words Elena Winter
Pictures Julian Charrière