For artist Julian Charrière, travels and field trips form the starting point for his artistic practice. He seeks to explore abandoned and remote places that often bear the traces of excessive human exploitation — such as the lithium fields in Bolivia and Chile or nuclear weapons test sites in Kazakhstan. According to Charrière, these places are man-made deserts. In 2016, he traveled to the Bikini Atolls of the Marshall Islands in the western Pacific and dived there for sunken battleships from the Second World War.
“There is something highly romantic in the shift of perception of these landscapes — like the Arctic, which was something very violent, became something very fragile that we want to protect”
— Julian Charrière
