Julian Charrière: Into the Hollow

Lars Dittrich and André Schlechtriem are pleased to present a solo exhibition by Julian Charrière entitled Into The Hollow. For his third solo exhibition with the gallery in Berlin, Charrière will transform the space into a cabinet of geological curiosities from a possible post-digital era with an installation where selected pieces of manipulated molten rock are displayed in vitrines like topological fragments in a natural history museum from a time yet to come.

The presented objects are hybrids of congealed magma. Charrière has melted, transmuted and amalgamated current technological gadgets (smartphones, notebooks, hard drives etc.), including their stored memory, within molten rock. Through this artificial process, the artist forces the transfer of digital to geological strata in which only the potential of the previous storage powers remains. “The precious metals contained in these sculptural stones—the ecologically problematic and economically controversial basis of our digital world—are mined in the furthest reaches of the Earth, and ultimately have been returned in Charrière’s metaphorical transformation process to their original form.“ (Julia Brennacher, “Living in The Anthopocene,” in The Forces Behind the Forms: Geology, Matter, Process in Contemporary Art, Cologne: Snoeck, 2016)

In bringing all these metal components together and by artificially returning them to their geological origins, Charrière re-creates a primal epicenter, making a connection between the very beginnings of our Earth, current industrial and technological processes and projecting a possible future. In his play with future geologies, Charrière constructs a synthetic image of a future past, a place where the traces of our civilization will hide among rock formations.

Charrière’s Into The Hollow encourages us to reflect on the circulation of the materials that are now melted into the stones as well as the relevance of deep mining as a necessary process for their extraction. The source of these materials, the physical open pit mines, represent the locus for the ingredients that drive our communication and technological society, while physically also constituting a negative image or inversion of the Biblical Tower of Babel.