The Gods Must Be Crazy, 2019

With The Gods Must Be Crazy, Charrière leads the viewer down toward the mysterious grounds of the deep sea, likely to be the most remote and least explored environment of our planet; a region mediated to us largely through the gathering and evaluation of scientific images. In the installation, forty-nine screens display a collection of found under­water footage. Each individual clip acts as a contemporary vanitas; yet together they appear as speculative windows into a post-human future, a destiny where all that remains of our civilizations is floating detritus. Some prospective dystopia—or utopia— where artificial intelligence scans the seafloor in search of remnants of human presence; the totems of our hubris, drowned in the abyss.

In reality, the artist carefully selected each sequence from hours of scientific footage, searching for the subtle appearance of human traces and apparitions at the bottom of the sea—relics of civilization, now slowly being repossessed by deep-sea dwellers. These fleeting visions reveal a submerged archaeology where culture and nature intermingle, where ruins turn into habitats, and objects once destined for the surface world reappear as spectral monuments of modernity.

Charrière’s evaluation and enact­ment of this found footage brings to light how our endeavors of scientific exploration into seemingly uncharted territory are already preempted by the influence of our modern society. On these scientific journeys into the unknown, we encounter the traces of our culture manifesting in the dislocation of everyday objects which—sometimes as desolate ruins, sometimes inhabited by sea dwellers—turn into unintended monuments of modernity.