We Are All Astronauts

French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière’s works explore changing perceptions of time and space in a world accelerated and flattened by globalisation; often investigating ways in which the virtual world dictates our experience of the ‘real’. Charriere’s explorations of these ideas often result in dramatic, near-absurd interventions in a wide range of places. In 2012, he made Blue Fossil Entropic Stories, for which he climbed atop an Icelandic glacier with a blow torch and tried to melt it for 8 hours in an attempt to burn what is, to the artist, a vast natural reservoir of time.

Charrière’s exhibit at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014 is linked to an earlier project, Monument – Sedimentation of Floating World (2013), for which he collected mineral samples from all recognised nations in the world. He mixed these with cement to cast a pillar, pinning down into a ‘concrete’ form nations and cultures that often exist for his audience only as floating entities in a virtual world. Leftover mineral samples from this project were used to make ‘international sandpaper’, with which the artist scraped the surfaces of 13 found globes manufactured between 1890 and 2011, creating smooth spheres shorn of all markings. Charrière’s installation at the biennale, We Are All Astronauts (2013), consists of these globes hung over a table on which are scattered the sandpapered remnants of their surfaces.

The artist’s act of erasure mirrors the flattening of boundaries and differences that characterises the age we live in. It simultaneously evokes natural processes ever at work, constantly reshaping the contours of the world.