Julian Charrière
July 8, 2025
The Triennial spoke with Triennial 2025 artist Julian Charrière about his project, Calls for Action, now on view at the Triennial Hub at Lyrik in Back Bay. Read our conversation below to learn how Charrière finds traces of natural ecology in modern technology, how art can reframe our understanding of “remote” landscapes, and the role public art plays in fostering spaces for truly democratic encounters.
Your Triennial project uses the technology available to us to create a bridge between Boston and a South American rainforest. Why do you consider it important to create an intentional connection like this in a world that sometimes seems over-saturated with opportunities for less meaningful connections through technology?
In Calls for Action, I wanted to subvert the usual direction of technological mediation—from extraction to presence. So often, the tools we use are embedded in global systems that make invisible the places they depend on. By creating a live, sensorial bridge between Boston and a rainforest in South America, the project becomes a kind of counter-circuit—an attempt to make space for attentiveness rather than consumption.
This connection isn’t arbitrary. Boston is home to the largest Brazilian community in the United States. Establishing this link between a specific forest ecosystem and the city is a way to acknowledge the layered, living relationship between communities and the ecologies they’ve left behind—or been separated from. We live in a time of overlapping migrations: human, animal, botanical, mineral. Calls for Action is not a technological spectacle, but a space to sense those displacements—and to recognize that the ecological and the cultural are never separate.
In a world full of hyperconnectivity and shallow contact, I wanted to create a moment of meaningful resonance—a reminder that distance doesn’t diminish interdependence. It can, in fact, deepen it.
You often take geological time into consideration in your work. There are quasi-mystical elements present when humans try to imagine experiencing time like that. How do you approach conveying this type of time in your work?
Geological time challenges our sense of agency—it reminds us that we are ephemeral, yet impactful. I try to work with materials and environments that carry their own temporal codes: ash, ice, minerals, decay. Rather than represent time as a concept, I allow it to emerge through the physicality of the work. It’s not about visualizing deep time, but about inhabiting the sensations it provokes—stillness, fragility, weight, latency. In that space, the mystical isn’t ornamental—it’s structural. The gap between our perception and Earth’s memory becomes a kind of tension field, charged with uncertainty and potential.
In Calls for Action, though, the relationship to time shifts. It’s less about deep time in the geological sense, and more about an organic or botanical temporality—a slowness tied to growth, decay. The rainforest exists in a different temporality, and the installation mirrors that. In contrast to the speed with which we typically consume images and information, this work requires stillness and patience. It invites a different kind of attention, one where meaning unfolds gradually. It’s in this slowness that the world begins to crystallize. I think that’s where a deeper kind of engagement becomes possible.
Your work draws attention to the relationship between technology and the climate crisis. How do you hope people engage with the project?
Technology is never neutral—it always reflects the desires and contradictions of the culture that produces it. In Calls for Action, the very medium—real-time transmission—carries a double valence. The data streams we use to connect can also be traced back to networks of deforestation, mining, and resource extraction. So I hope the work makes people feel that tension: that the tools we rely on can both sever and reattach us to the world. If the project succeeds, it should leave visitors with a heightened sense of implication—an awareness that we’re not outside the system, but pulsing within it, entangled.
I’m less interested in whether people see the rainforest clearly, and more in whether they feel its presence differently. The goal isn’t to provide access, but to create proximity.
A unique aspect of your project is that it offers visitors an encounter in real time (albeit not real space). What do you hope visitors take away from this experience of time vs place?
We’ve become accustomed to thinking of real-time experiences as virtual, abstract, or somehow less “authentic.” But real-time, in this case, is a tether—a direct link between two ecologies. By erasing spatial proximity while preserving temporal immediacy, the work asks: what does it mean to share a moment with something far away? Can simultaneity create empathy where distance doesn’t allow touch? I hope visitors experience a subtle shift in orientation—a soft recalibration of how we define connection. Maybe it’s not just about being there, but about being with.
At the same time, I’m trying to foster a sense of intimacy—something that feels increasingly rare. We’ve surrounded ourselves with barriers: walls, clothes, cities, infrastructures that separate us from the ecosystems we’re embedded in. In many ways, we’ve forgotten how to inhabit the world as part of it. Calls for Action invites visitors to break that distance, to enter into intimate exchange with other life forms. It asks: what does it mean to listen—not as a metaphor, but as a practice? And beyond that, what does it mean to speak to another entity, to attempt a dialogue with the more than-human? These are questions we’ve often sidelined in Western culture, but they’re essential if we want to reimagine our place in the world. This work doesn’t provide answers, but it opens a space for that encounter—for being in the presence of the unknown, and choosing to stay with it.
Mythology has informed global “exploration” (often thinly-veiled colonization). You frequently reflect on how we recount these myths in your work. What do you consider the political significance of works that engage with remote landscapes?
“Remote” is always a question of perspective—what feels distant to one culture or individual may be intimately close to another. The term itself often encodes a colonial gaze, implying that certain places exist outside of relevance or proximity unless they’re made visible, legible, or useful to dominant systems of knowledge. In my work, I try to unsettle that notion—to show that so-called remote landscapes are not peripheral, but central to the functioning of our world.
These environments—glacial zones, deep oceans, tropical forests—are often presented as sublime voids or pristine frontiers. But in reality, they’re deeply entangled with histories of extraction, conquest, and displacement. They’re repositories of both ecological memory and cultural violence. By engaging with these sites, I’m not interested in documenting them as untouched or exotic; I’m interested in how they’ve been mythologized, instrumentalized, and increasingly destabilized.
Art has the capacity to reframe these spaces—not to represent them as “other,” but to suggest new modes of relation. If we can move beyond the illusion of distance, we might begin to see how our everyday lives are materially and spiritually connected to these places. To work with “remote” landscapes is to challenge the structures that have kept them distant in the first place—and to question what it means to belong, to witness, to be implicated.
Remote landscapes have long been cast as blank canvases onto which power, desire, and ideology are projected. By engaging with these sites, I try to disturb those inherited narratives—to show that these places are not inert or abstract, but complex, lived, and storied in ways that resist our myths.
Art here can act as a kind of counter-mapping—a gesture toward other ways of relating.
What does public art mean to you? What does an immersive public art experience offer to visitors?
Public space itself carries a particular energy—it’s not contained by institutional thresholds, which can sometimes act as filters or barriers to entry. In the street, in the square, in the everyday flow of a city, people don’t arrive prepared to engage with art. They stumble into it, they pause, they return. That lack of framing can be incredibly powerful—it invites a different kind of attention, one that’s less mediated, more immediate. When art happens within the fabric of the city, it becomes part of daily life rather than an exception to it. That shift can create a more democratic space for encounter.
It exists in the shared space between strangers—it doesn’t require a ticket, just attention. An immersive experience, especially in a public context, opens up the possibility for a collective kind of sensing. You’re not just encountering an artwork; you’re encountering others encountering it. There’s a choreography of presence. In Calls for Action, that presence extends across continents—but it’s still grounded in a physical body, standing, listening, breathing. That, to me, is what public art can offer: a space to re-tune ourselves—to each other, and to the planetary systems we’re a part of.