Julian Charriére
Sun Sets in Stone
Piezography on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308g
46 x 38.3 cm
Edition 50 + 10 AP
1'780.00 CHF

In the artwork 'Sun Sets in Stone' the artist Julian Charrière collapses both time and space, bridging a deep time that makes uncertain the threshold between the organic and geological; living and fossil. The artwork marks the continuation of the artist’s experiments with analogue double exposure photography, an unpredictable process where the final image is subject to accident rather than the will of the photographer. A medium format analogue camera is used that brings together two subjects, in this case an Ecuadorian cloud forest and a material trace from the Carboniferous period.

To realize this, Julian Charrière first surveyed the undergrowth of a Western Andean Cloud Forest, overgrown with tree ferns, orchids and bromeliads. A key biodiversity hotspot in Ecuador, it marks a site both biologically rich and deeply threatened by resource extraction, climate change and the global agro-industrial complex. On the same film negative, the artist then documented a Carboniferous era fossil, found in the geological collection of the Natural History Museum in Berlin. Folding the forest of the present into the remains of a past primordial realm, Sun Sets in Stone forges a panchronic ecosystem of its own, which while growing 350 million years apart, in the organic synapsis of planet Earth remain inextricably linked.

Printed using coal pigments, a method known as piezography, the artwork also brings to the foreground themes of resource extraction, explicating the liveliness which inhabits our fossil fuels.

All proceeds from the sale of this edition will go to the non-profit foundation Art into Acres to contribute to the strategic conservation of the rainforest through projects selected as part of Calls for Action.