The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories I, 2013
The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories II, 2013
The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories III, 2013

The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories is the photographic trace of an expedition the artist undertook in 2013, traveling to Iceland to climb an iceberg in the Arctic Ocean and melt the frozen water beneath his feet with a gas torch for eight hours. Like an absurd, quixotic hero, Julian Charrière confronts the elements in a seemingly hopeless battle—human time against geological time. And yet, it is a battle of which global warming is only the starting point. The act of ignition, here starkly isolated by one human upon one floating iceberg, speaks to the cumulative consequences of our individual actions, as well as inac­tions, in relation to global warming.

Our attention is drawn to the impacts of combustion, and to how the repercussions of our uncontrolled burns often play out in places which, though no less vital for planetary climatic stability, exist far beyond our daily purvey. With the intervention, Charrière reminds us that in the places our home world is not covered by plants, or oceans, it is covered by ice. And that it is here, in the glacial domain, that those impacts are regis­tered most acutely. Visually, the three photographs documenting the action act as a kind of mirror to Caspar David Friedrich’s iconic Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (ca. 1817), whereby, through reintegrating the human into landscape, Charrière questions the problematic relation to nature as inherited from the past.