Julian Charrière: Midnight Zone and the art of seeing in the dark

Julian Charrière listens to the world’s silences and surfaces with questions we can’t afford to ignore. Moving between art, science, and anthropology, his work focuses on the fragile intersections of ecology, history, and human ambition. The artist treats each site not as a spectacle but as a collaborator. His latest solo exhibition, Midnight Zone, on view at Museum Tinguely from 11th June till 2nd November, explores our complex relationship with water—from the Rhine to the remote depths of the Pacific Ocean. Through photographs, sculptures, installations, and film, he reflects on water as both a vital force and a fragile system under pressure. In this conversation, he discusses perception, environmental collapse, and why art’s real power lies in helping us feel what we’ve been taught to overlook.

hube: Your work fuses art, science, and anthropology. Can you reflect on your early life and how it shaped your desire to investigate the relationship between humanity and the natural world?

Julian Charrière: I grew up in a small village nestled between the Jura mountains and Lake Geneva—landscapes shaped by deep time, glacial erosion, and tectonic restlessness. I think that kind of environment imprints you early. There was a constant sense that the land held stories far older than us. Later, I became drawn to how we interpret those stories—how culture, science, and myth all attempt to make sense of the same terrain. My work sits in that overlap: not trying to resolve the contradictions, but to inhabit them.

h: What personal and creative challenges did you face when engaging with sites like Semipalatinsk Test Site? And how did these environments alter your perception of the natural world?

JC: Standing on ground ruptured by nuclear detonation destabilises every inherited notion of landscape. At the Semipalatinsk Test Site, you find yourself in a place where the soil has been weaponised—transformed into a memory bank for violence and trauma. The challenge is not only logistical, navigating zones of restricted access and incomplete data, but deeply emotional. How do you respond, as an artist, to something so abstract and yet so permanent.

Being there confronted me with the reality that the natural world is not passive. It is a witness—sometimes even a victim. These sites alter your relationship to materials, to temporality, and to the very idea of “wilderness.” What appears barren or inert is often saturated with unseen histories, with geologies of consequence.

One of the most haunting aspects is how the thermonuclear blast creates a kind of temporal anomaly. The heat of the explosion is so intense that it fuses the ground, forming a new geological stratum in the space of a microsecond. It compresses time into matter, collapsing the continuity of geological epochs into an artificial and violent instant. This rupture—this unconformity in the stratigraphic record—reveals just how profoundly human activity can inscribe itself into deep time.

For me, being in such a place brought about a profound perceptual shift. It is one of those rare sites where the world becomes legible in an entirely different register—where hope and despair coexist, and where the scale of our actions becomes terrifyingly clear.

h: Much of your work stems from research and field exploration. How do you navigate the transition from conceptualising an idea to physically manifesting it in a sculptural or photographic form?

JC: Fieldwork is a way of destabilising the studio. It opens the process to chance, to risk, to collaboration—with non-human and human, with environments and ecosystems, with the unpredictable. I never travel with a fixed outcome in mind. Instead, I collect: sounds, samples, impressions, atmospheres. I gather fragments that resonate and bring them back to the studio. But the work itself begins to take form in the encounter. It is through that visceral, embodied experience that the intuition for physical manifestation emerges.

The transition from concept to form is not linear. Sometimes it is slow. Sometimes it requires failure—or even multiple returns to the same site. But for me, it is crucial that the final piece carries the residue of the experience, rather than simply depicting it. The intensity of that encounter must be distilled into form—whether static or time-based—so that it holds something of that original charge.

h: Can you walk us through your creative process for Midnight Zone? How did you develop the conceptual framework for the installation?

JC: Midnight Zone began as a question: how do we engage with a space that we can’t see, can’t visit, and barely understand—but are already exploiting? The deep sea remains one of the least accessible, least regulated, and yet most contested terrains on the planet. I wanted to create a work that didn’t represent this abyssal environment from above or at a distance, but instead tried to approximate the kind of perceptual disorientation and atmospheric pressure that defines it.

The conceptual framework grew through collaborations with oceanographers, acoustic engineers, deep-sea biologists, and from time spent tracing the outlines of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, an abyssal plain in the central Pacific where mining interests are increasingly concentrated. It’s a site of tremendous geological and ecological complexity, home to slow-growing corals, undiscovered species, and polymetallic nodules that formed over millions of years—and which we’re now preparing to remove at an industrial scale.

The project took shape as an immersion rather than a depiction. I wasn’t interested in a documentary mode, but in building an affective architecture—something that might translate pressure, darkness, drift. With my team, we constructed a custom Fresnel lighthouse lens and filmed it descending through the water column, not only as an illuminating guide, but as a kind of intruder. The lens attracts creatures, but also symbolises the extractive gaze—the impulse to reach into and claim the unknown.

I also wanted the installation to feel unstable, to mirror the lack of solid ground beneath our understanding of this biome. The camera orbits the light, untethered. Light fractures, bounces, disappears. You don’t stand in front of the work—you drift inside it.

In that way, Midnight Zone is a kind of perceptual experiment. It’s about resisting mastery, resisting the urge to map and name. It’s about listening to what remains outside of our reach, and about confronting the fact that even these unreachable depths are now within the grasp of human ambition—and already bearing the cost.

h: In Midnight Zone, the metaphorical relationship between the ocean and human activity is explored. What materials did you use in this project, and what do they symbolise in relation to the deep-sea environment?

JC: In Midnight Zone, material presence gives way to a more ephemeral sensibility. This is not an exhibition grounded in objects or mass, but in phenomena, particularly sound and light. These two elements become the primary materials of the show. They serve as leitmotifs, guiding the viewer through the different works and weaving together the various narrative and spatial threads of the exhibition.

What is compelling is how these media behave differently in the deep sea. Light barely exists there—it fades, fractures, or disappears entirely—while sound becomes a dominant mode of perception. In this way, the show echoes the very logic of the ocean’s depths, where traditional sensory hierarchies are reversed. Sound travels further, becomes spatial and immersive. Light, when it does appear, is often bioluminescent—mysterious, flickering, unstable.

This results in a show that, while not materially dense, is deeply physical. It does not rely on heavy objects to make its impact. Instead, it creates a synaesthetic experience—one that moves through your body rather than around it. It’s a choreography of perception: immersive, disorienting, and sensorially charged.

For me, that immateriality is not a lack—it’s a deliberate choice. It mirrors the fragility, vastness, and invisibility of the deep-sea environment. In Midnight Zone, sound and light are not just aesthetic tools—they are symbolic of a world that resists grasp and yet urgently demands attention.

h: What role did your fieldwork play in shaping this exhibition, and how did your experiences with deep-sea environments and the study of ecosystems influence the visual and conceptual narrative of Midnight Zone?

JC: Fieldwork was absolutely central to the development of Midnight Zone. The exhibition emerged from a long process of immersion—both literal and conceptual—into deep-sea environments and the fragile ecosystems that inhabit them. I undertook a series of intense diving experiences, from exploring the cenotes in Mexico to descending through the water column above the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone. Being underwater for extended periods, moving through gradients of pressure, darkness, and suspended life, profoundly shaped how I approached the project, both visually and structurally.

Equally formative were my experiences participating in scientific expeditions, ranging from Greenland to Antarctica, most notably aboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s research vessel. Working closely with deep-sea biologists and marine scientists, I gained insight into how they engage with these inaccessible environments, often through robotic technologies like ROVs (remotely operated vehicles). Observing their methodologies—how they read the space, interpret absence, or search for signs of life—had a deep impact on how I conceptualised the exhibition.

These field encounters informed not just the content, but the entire sensorial logic of Midnight Zone. The exhibition seeks to recreate a perceptual space shaped by uncertainty and awe—an environment where light and sound behave differently, where our usual sense of scale collapses, and where ecosystems remain largely invisible yet vitally alive. It became important to me that the viewer not only see these ideas but feel them—physically and intuitively—as a way of approaching the ocean not just as data, but as a space of emotional and ecological entanglement.

h: As Midnight Zone is set to travel to other institutions like the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, how do you see the exhibition’s message evolving with each new audience and location?

JC: Midnight Zone was never conceived as something static, but rather as a body in motion, much like water itself. This fluidity becomes especially important as the exhibition transitions from the Museum Tinguely to Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. At Tinguely, Midnight Zone occupies ten separate spaces—each with its own rhythm, resonance, and pressure. In Wolfsburg, by contrast, the show will inhabit one vast, continuous volume. The architectural shift from polyphonic sequence to singular expanse means that the experience of the exhibition will be entirely reconfigured. Even if the core body of works remains the same, the way they’re distilled and displayed will differ radically. In many ways, these will be two completely different exhibitions.

h: While nature and the environment play a central role in much of your work, where else do you draw inspiration from? Are there non-environmental sources, such as music, history, or technology, that have influenced your creative process?

JC: Yes, absolutely. While the natural world and the landscapes we inhabit remain the primary source of inspiration in my work, I constantly draw from other disciplines to expand the ways I perceive and interpret reality. Literature—especially science fiction—has had a profound influence. Writers like J.G. Ballard, with his dystopian poetics of transformation, opened up a way of thinking about environmental collapse as aesthetic territory.

Equally important are certain theorists and philosophers—Timothy Morton, Emanuele Coccia, or Donna Haraway—whose thinking encourages a kind of entangled awareness, a way of seeing the world not in isolation but as a dense mesh of relationships across scales and species.

I’m genuinely drawn to looking at the world through other prisms—be it music, literature, or science. These perspectives allow me to reflect more consciously on how I construct my own subjective image of reality. Music, especially electronic music, has also played a strong role over the years. It’s not just a soundtrack, but a kind of conceptual and emotional framework—a way of inhabiting time and space differently.

Some of the visual or spatial strategies I use are even borrowed from nightlife and rave culture: stroboscopic lighting, fog, sonic disorientation.

h: Do you believe that art can act as a mirror to humanity’s most pressing struggles, or is it a tool to overcome them? How do you navigate between depicting the harsh realities of the world and offering something more hopeful or imaginative through your art?

JC: I think one of the most urgent crises we face today is a crisis of imagination—the inability to see ourselves outside the systems that are leading us toward collapse. In that sense, art isn’t just a mirror; it’s a kind of kaleidoscope. It can reframe our perception, recalibrate our attention, and help us rediscover the world anew—especially our relationship to the living, to the planet, to what we often overlook.

I’m not claiming that my work is hopeful in itself, but I do believe in the radical hope embedded in art’s ability to shift perspective—to open up space for other ways of seeing, feeling, and being.

h: What are some of your favourite places you’ve visited, and what makes them so special to you?

JC: Honestly, it’s an impossible question. The world unfolds in so many textures, climates, and rhythms that choosing a single place feels almost like a betrayal of the rest. I’ve been fortunate—deeply fortunate—to witness a range of environments that continue to shape the way I think, feel, and make art. From the crystalline stillness of alpine summits in my native country to the vibrant, breathing complexity of the coral reefs in Raja Ampat, or the haunting immensity of the Arctic—each landscape offers its own kind of revelation.

What makes a place special to me isn’t just its beauty, but the way it shifts my sense of scale or time—how it challenges perception or invites a different kind of attention. Some places feel like they’re holding ancient knowledge just beneath the surface.

I don’t think I could name a favourite. It’s the contrast between places, the movement from one ecosystem or atmosphere to another, that keeps me curious. Each journey becomes part of a larger mosaic—one that continually reshapes how I understand the world and my place within it.