Julian Charrière - INTO THE HOLLOW

Lars Dittrich and André Schlechtriem are pleased to present a solo exhibition by Julian Charrière entitled Deep Down InsideInto The Hollow. For his third solo -exhibition with the gallery in Berlin, Charrière will transform the space into a cabinet of geological curiosities from a possible post-digital era within an installation where selected pieces of manipulated molten rock are displayed into vitrines, like topological fragments in a natural history museum from a time yet to come.

The presented objects are melted hybrids of congealed magma. Charrière has melted, transmuted and amalgamated current technological gadgets (smartp Phones, nNotebooks, hHard dDrives etc.), including their stored memory, within molten rock. Through this artificial man-driven process, the artist forces the transfer of the digital to geological strata, in which only the potential of the previous storage powers remains. “The precious metals contained in these sculptural stones— – the ecologically problematic and economically controversial basis of our digital world— – are mined in the furthest reaches of the Earth, and ultimately have been returned in Charrière´’s metaphorical transformation process to their original form.“ (Julia Brennacher, “Living in The Anthopocene, “” in The Forces Behind the Forms: – Geology, Matter, Process in Contemporary Art, Cologne: Snoeck. Germany., 2016)

In bringing all these metal components together and by artificially returning them to their geological origins, Charrière re-creates a primal epicenter, making a connection between the very beginnings of our Earth, current industrial and technological processes and projecting a possible future. In his play with future geologies, Charrière constructs an artificiala synthetic image of a future past, a place where the traces of our civilization will hide among rock formations.

Charrière´’s Deep Down InsideInto The Hollow encourages us to reflect on the circulation of the materials that are now melted into the stones as well as the relevance of deep mining as a necessary process for their extraction. The source of these materials, the physical open pit mines, represent the locus for the ingredients that drive our communication and technological society, while physically also constituting a negative -image or inversion of the Biblical Tower of Babel.

From today´’s mine to tomorrow´’s monuments.

These minerals are excavated from at different locations around the world, then shipped to countries like India, China or the United States to be assembled together into technological devices, a process that may be considered as a cultural crystalizationscrystallization of a globalized production scheme.. MOne where all these materials sourced from various geographies are brought together in physical objects by which , through it's function, we are all digitally connected.

When these become outdated they are sent to e-waste sites, where they are hand picked and separated in order to fuel more technology, thus re-entering the circulation process. Charrière interrupts this recycling flow by prematurely transmutatingtransmuting these delicate devices. Through this forcible interventione, he initiates a geo-artistic reflection onf our digital consumer culture, a ‘geo-reset’: back to the future.

A full exhibition catalog including a text by Paul Feigelfeld will be published and available through the gallery. Please contact Owen Clements, owen(at)dittrich-schlechtriem.com, for press information and with any further questions or requests.

The gallery will have extended hours during Gallery Weekend and will remain open Saturday and Sunday, April 30th and May 1st, from 11am –to 7pm.