A Thousand Worlds, 2025

Julian Charrière, with his minimalist artwork A Thousand Worlds, presents a small single mirror floating on the wall. Made using a classical mirroring technique, where a layer of silver is deposited on the back surface of the glass, it forms a highly reflective patina. Not immediately evident to the viewer, the silver used for this artwork has been extracted from thousands of black-and-white photographs, which accumulated the metal in the paper during their production process. This photographic method, known as the gelatin silver process, relies on silver halide crystals in a gelatin emulsion reacting to light, forming latent images. Through a laborious process of extraction and trans­formation, Charrière reclaims this silver, revealing a hidden economy of image-making, and by extension, a reflection on anthropogenic resource exploitation—a system where vast amounts of mineral, metal, and organic material are continually extracted, destroyed, and remade to serve human needs.

Yet A Thousand Worlds is also an intimate meditation on the relation­ship between the self and the act of image production. Drawing on psychology, the mirror emerges not only as a reflective surface, but as a symbolic space where identity is mined, questioned, and reframed. As­sembled from the dissolved remnants of countless photographs, the work becomes a collective mirror—a liquid space where individual memories and captured moments, once entangled and singular, are melted down and reconstituted into a unified, ambiguous reflection. It offers an eternal return in which personal histories are both obliterated and preserved, reappearing as something other— a sea of something shared.