JULIAN CHARRIÈRE

Legend has it that when the Parícutin volcano emerged from the middle of a cornfield in Michoacán in 1943, the force of the eruption caused the bell of the church of San Juan Parangaricutiro to ring on its own. No one pulled the rope. It was the mountain itself, being born beneath the feet of the villagers, that set the bell ringing.

Historically, a bell is both a tool and a symbol, made to order human time and mark the passage of hours; call people to mass, announce a death or a celebration, here suddenly struck by a much older chronology: geological time. It is the Earth calling to us, rather than the other way around.

Many decades later, Charrière returns to this story with the curiosity and attentiveness that run throughout his practice. His work often begins with the observation of a phenomenon and unfolds through research, fieldwork, and material experimentation, without assuming that knowing or investigating something will necessarily dispel its mystery. On the contrary, his works seem drawn to what remains open even after it has been observed, measured, or recorded.

The original church bell, dismantled due to the progression of the lava and kept for years in a convent near the volcano, was three-dimensionally scanned and digitally modeled by the artist. From this record, its form was carved from a single block of volcanic rock . In Ring of Fire, the work that gives the exhibition its title, the bell seems to emerge partially from the same igneous matter that once buried its village: half object, half stone; half remnant, half apparition, emitting from within itself the endless after-resonance of a bell being rung.

It is from this place, between event and myth, materiality, memory, scientific measurement and older ways of listening and paying attention to the world, that the exhibition unfolds.

In Mexico, mountains have never been merely geographical features. Long before volcanoes were observed through seismographs and sensors, they were already being watched, named, listened to, and interpreted. Since its reawakening in 1994, the Popocatépetl for example, has been under continuous observation, yet its presence extends far beyond the realm of science. Deeply rooted in Mexican memory and popular history and imagination, it remains surrounded by stories, rituals, and forms of knowledge passed down through generations. Science and myth seem to pose the same question in different languages about how we might heed what is happening beneath our feet.

Charrière situates himself precisely within this zone of interference. His works draw on contemporary technologies; sensors, seismic recordings, three-dimensional scanning, photographic processes, as well as materials whose histories vastly precede our own: basalt, tezontle, ash, obsidian, coal, and mineral accretions. Rather than setting technology against myth, he brings them together around the same mystery: a vast, abundant, and still largely unknown planetary body, moving and transforming independently, and in spite of us.

In Dark Labyrinth, large pieces of tezontle hang suspended in space. Both volcanic rock and a material fundamental to the architectural history of Mexico City, tezontle has been used for centuries to build upon a territory whose instability has never entirely disappeared. Charrière excavates cavities into the stones and invites visitors to place their heads inside them. Within, seismic and geophonic data from Popocatépetl’s monitoring stations are transmitted live, modulating pulses of stroboscopic light and sound. The body momentarily becomes both instrument and amplifier, a tool for sensorially approaching what is happening inside the mountain. To do so, one must quite literally put one’s head inside a rock.

The gesture is part scientific instrument, part oracle. Pulses of light can produce spirals, lattices, and radiant geometries behind the eyelids, visual phenomena bearing a striking resemblance to motifs inscribed in stone by prehistoric cultures separated widely in both time and space. A descent into the interior of the Earth and through folds of time, becomes entangled with another descent, into perception itself. Technology does not dispel the mystery. It makes it perceptible.

Something similar happens in After the Smoke Cradle | Popocatépetl. Here, the volcano is not simply photographed. Ash and lava gathered by Charrière on his journey toward the summit of Popocatépetl are crushed and transformed into pigments; the images are then finished with a layer of obsidian dust suspended in mineral oil. The mountain physically enters its own representation.

Photography thus ceases to function solely as a record of landscape: the image contains what it depicts. Ash, lava, and volcanic glass turn its surface into a form of sedimentation. The image no longer merely represents a territory; it carries some of its matter with it.

Obsidian reappears in Caldera, polished into a black mirror and set within a cavity carved into a block of anthracite coal. Before it, burns the small flame of an oil lamp.

The materials bring together radically different temporalities. Obsidian is born when molten matter from within the Earth cools rapidly; coal comes from ancient forests buried and compressed over millions of years. One emerges from the depths through eruption; the other is ancient life returned to the surface through extraction. Between them burns a human flame, small and provisional.

But obsidian also introduces another history of looking. Long before becoming an object of geological knowledge, volcanic glass was used as a mirror and as a surface through which to seek access to what lies beyond ordinary sight. In Caldera, looking into the stone recovers something of that ambiguity: to observe can mean to measure, contemplate, remember, imagine, or attempt to anticipate what has not yet happened. The presence of coal shifts this gaze toward a much more recent industrial history. Over the past centuries, learning to extract and burn the energy accumulated within this material has allowed us to radically transform the world. Humanity’s capacity to intervene in the Earth has, on its own scale, turned us into a geological force. The flame illuminates, but it also consumes.

If the boulders of Dark Labyrinth seem to contain a pulse, and the obsidian in Caldera a possibility of both vision and obfuscation, in Imperfect Lovers it is human time that begins to give way. The series formally begins with traditional nineteenth-century mechanical clocks subjected to processes of crystallization and mineral accretion. Salt, calcium carbonate, copper, chromium, and other compounds advance across their halted mechanisms. Instruments built to measure the passage of time ultimately become covered and mineralized by it.

Drawing on Félix González-Torres’s Untitled (Perfect Lovers), in which two identical clocks move forward together while inevitably beginning to fall out of sync, Charrière’s composition shifts this fragility to another scale. Here, it is no longer only two bodies that cease to share the same time, but the mechanical, regular, productive time of modernity confronting geo-temporalities that obey neither the clock nor our conventions. The clocks cease to measure time and become its fossils.

Throughout Ring of Fire, Charrière gathers a small constellation of human instruments: a bell, clocks, cameras, sensors, monitoring systems. Objects conceived to summon, measure, record, or anticipate. Again and again, however, what they attempt to order ultimately exceeds them. Perhaps this is why the bell remains at the center of the exhibition.

A bell exists to be set in motion and produce a signal. Its sound travels through the air, calls out, and eventually fades away. Ring of Fire, as a whole, __extends that resonance into an endless song, where we can no longer distinguish whether what we are hearing is a bell, a machine, or a mountain.

Beneath our cities, our calendars, our clocks, and our histories, another time continues to exist: a mineral, seismic, subterranean time, immeasurably older than we are.

Perhaps all that remains is the idea that we must learn how to listen.

Courtesy OMR.