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, layered onto a single black and white negative – a snapshot of biomes both past and present.
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. In the same way, the unexpected nature of the double exposure symbolizes our hubristic belief in being able to control biogeochemical cycles without disturbing them. Produced in the context of Julian Charrière’s Calls for Action, a public artwork that also connects urban cities with remote and endangered forests via livestreams, the print too functions as a portal, not only between worlds but towards new forms of meaning–making beyond human time scales. It is also a keen reminder for the oft forgotten debt industrialized society owes to the agency and experimentation of vegetal life. Sun Sets in Stone celebrates this plant–based planetary custodianship, a presence without which the onslaught of climate change would be even harsher––while also memorializing their ghosts, released once more into the atmosphere when we erratically burn coal, oil and natural gas.