Palais de Tokyo

“Stone Speakers” is a site specific and immersive project. It invites the audience to enter a volcanic landscape of mineral sculptures, amid which one can hear the primordial conversations of the earth by way of a multidimensional sound system. Using recordings of volcanoes made in Columbia, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iceland, and Sicily, Julian Charrière connects us with the bowels of the planet, seen not as an inert kingdom, but on the contrary as a living, vibrant place. Magma chambers, tides, and tectonic plates all in motion come together. The artist thus convenes different geological entities to form a “parliament of volcanoes”. The exhibition space, transformed into a symbolical crater, amplifies their rumbling, penetrating dialogues – creating an echo chamber at the core of Palais de Tokyo. A live feed of data from global seismic monitoring stations bridges the art centre with the inaudible reality of the underland.
A mix of performance, sculpture, installation, video and photography, Julian Charrière’s works are often the result of fieldwork in liminal or discarded locations. By exploring places with acute geophysical identities (volcanoes, icefields, radioactive sites…), the artist presents alternative histories and opens speculative windows which look across deep geological as well as human time. His expeditions and projects, organised in collaboration with scientists, engineers, musicians, art historians and philosophers - offer a way to go beyond the disciplinary boundaries of art, while deconstructing the human definition of “nature”, from Romanticism to the Anthropocene. With his immersive works, Julian Charrière questions the perception and representation of the natural world, inventing planetary narratives for the future.

Julian Charrière is a Franco-Swiss artist born in Morges (Switzerland) in 1987. He lives and works in Berlin (Germany). He has previously collaborated with the Palais de Tokyo on the group exhibitions “The Dream of Forms” (2017) and “The Unfinished Presents” (off the walls in the context of the 12th Lyon Biennial, 2013). Recent solo exhibitions include “Controlled Burn” (Langen Foundation, Neuss, 2023), “Erratic” (SFMOMA, San Francisco, 2022), “Concentrations 63: Towards No Earthly Pole” (Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, 2021), “All We Ever Wanted Was Everything And Everywhere” (MAMbo, Bologna, 2019). He has also recently taken part in the National Gallery of Victoria Triennial (Melbourne, 2023) and the 16th Lyon Biennial (2022), as well as the exhibitions “Histoires des pierres” (Villa Medici, Rome, 2023) and “Les portes du possible. Art & science fiction” (Centre Pompidou-Metz, 2022). He has been nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize 2021. He is represented by the galleries Perrotin (Paris), Dittrich & Schlechtriem (Berlin), Galerie Tschudi (Zurich), Sies + Höke (Düsseldorf) and Sean Kelly (New York).

Curator: Daria de Beauvais