“The sky grows heavy, thickened by the excess carbon dioxide injected into the air since the Industrial Revolution. Its invisible weight looms over us like a leaden shadow.”11Martin Guinard, Le poids des ombres, Le catalogue du Prix Marcel Duchamp 2021, ADIAF, Silvana Editoriale, pp. 16–17.

How can one represent an environment that moves through us as we move through it? A question that gave rise to an artistic examination of air: Pure Waste and Weight of Shadows pick up on the interferences of an open cycle—with the ice masses far North as our guides.

These works address the transformation of humankind’s vision, from one which presumed increasingly fluid freedom from natural constraints to one that is now embedded in our suddenly dense atmosphere, slowed and even stuck by the unrelenting, unregulated expansion and compression of carbon around us.

Pure Waste attempts to give substance to this shifting mode of representation. How can one represent an absolute from invisible matter, when we ourselves are positioned at the intersection of embodying and embodied?

Standing on the icecap, a fossilized register of heaven, one can reflect on the magnified present and how its climatic disturbances forecast the future. The glaciers are oracles, messengers out of breath to explain the vanishing substance of our Earth, orators from the far North and the far South shouting out their tales of a long gone past and stressing the humans’ position within them. Today, their stories liquify.

We burn the past to fuel our increasingly hot future, unleashing the ghosts of ancient atmospheres compressed and fossilized into black substances. Those hidden deep under the Earth’s crust are resurfacing. Coal, a condensed carboniferous ecosystem, is setting fire to our dream of infinite growth and acceleration.

The air registers imprints of human agency. But the atmosphere has no memory. It relies on the cryosphere for any record of its shifting composition. As the world’s glaciers continue to melt—the result of carbon accumulation in the atmosphere—the memory of the sky begins to fall away.

In an attempt to explore this tension between matter and sky, Pure Waste aims to invert the typical mining process. Reverse extraction. Rather than digging down, extracting huge hunks of material, this intervention started by collecting carbon from the air. The air that is captured over polar glaciers reminds us that these are particles of the past. The exhalations of people become an invisible footprint that mirrors and symbolizes the human position within this chemical cycle.

The extracted carbon was then turned into diamonds, thus crystallizing the materiality, the minerality of a medium that we traverse and are traversed by.

Stronger collective belief in science and awareness of troubled cycles are reliant on cultural parallels—on translations to another formal language. Diamonds reflect inversions, and with this, foreground culturally-shaped values and draw attention to the lack of valence of what surrounds us. In search of the conditions for our collective understanding of the planet, the ways it is changing, and how we relate to it, one quickly realizes that it is our approaches which are in need of reflection.

Though precious in many ways, for Pure Waste these diamonds are compactions, a status quo of our life’s basis, and a manifestation of the shifting position of the world, where the mined resources of the ground have become an integral part of the sky. The diamonds were brought back to the North Greenland ice caps, the place of their genesis, and tossed into a deep glacier mill carved out by flowing melt-water in an attempt to free them from any cultural or productive value.

A gesture of pure waste but also one of reconciliation, an allegory for the possibility of closing the chemical cycles that we opened.

Julian Charrière is a French-Swiss artist living and working in Berlin. Addressing pressing matters of ecological concern, often through the lens of materiality and deep time, his work invites critical reflection on the cultural traditions of perceiving, representing and engaging with the natural world.

Please cite as: Charrière, J (2022) Weight of Shadows. In: Rosol C and Rispoli G (eds) Anthropogenic Markers: Stratigraphy and Context, Anthropocene Curriculum. Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. DOI: 10.58049/s8ft-4g53