Julian Charrière’s Calls for Action brings together public art with land conservation, opening a live feed between the city of Basel and a Western Andean Cloud Forest in Ecuador to highlight the interconnectivity of our planet, along with the environmental issues that threaten such vital ecosystems. Featuring a large screen suspended on the department store façade, the project acts as a real-time window into the rich biodiversity of an endangered ecoregion. Encouraging communication and interaction, a phone booth has been installed on the market square, wherein visitors can pick up a phone to both listen and talk to this far removed ecosystem. Fostering a more intimate connection between the city and the jungle, Calls for Action thus proposes an encounter beyond mere spectatorship, whereby speaking into the rainforest we can also speak out on its behalf.
Through this collective experience, Julian Charrière seeks to create new planetary bonds beyond the boundaries of our immediate surroundings, showing how art can be a tool for connecting with
environmental issues beyond our everyday lives. In the process it brings to the foreground urgent concerns regarding deforestation, environmental stewardship and the sustainable management of rainforests. Inherent in the project is not only creating an emotional link to a specific region, but also to make direct donations for conservation efforts there, in this case a cloud forest in Ecuador. Ranked as a biodiversity hotspot, it is one of 36 sites around the world that has at least 1,500 species of vascular plants that exist nowhere else on Earth, but which has already lost 70% of its primary vegetation. One of the wettest regions on the planet, it has a high rate of endemic species that occur nowhere else. Habitat to a number of endangered species, it is home to Great Green Macaws, Brown-headed Spider Monkeys, Black-breasted Pufflegs, White-lipped Peccaries, Harpy Eagles, Banded Ground Cuckoos, Geoffroy’s Tamarins, Tapirs, and Pumas. Beyond being crucial for biodiversity, carbon sequestration and hydrological cycles, cloud forests such as these represent a vital component of mitigating climate change and maintaining the health of our planet.
The conservation efforts of Calls for Action are facilitated with the support of Art into Acres, an artist-run, non-profit environmental initiative; Re:wild , a global organization supporting environmental causes around the world; and local collaboration with Fundación de Conservación Jocotoco , an Ecuadorian nongovernmental organization protecting areas of critical importance for the conservation of threatened
species in the region. The installation represents the beginning of a larger effort by the artist to bring awareness to the threats faced by rainforests around the world, run on an environmentally minded solar panel system, promoting a renewed closeness to the life and liveliness that inhabits these ecosystems.