On Wednesday, December 7, The 14th SAM Prize for Contemporary Art was awarded to Julian Charrière. The artist was chosen after the deliberations of the Scientific Committee 2022 composed of Gaël Charbau, Guillaume Desanges, Emmanuelle de l’Ecotais, Sébastien Gokalp, Sandra Hegedüs, Mattieu Lelièvre, Jean-Hubert Martin and Jérôme Sans. Each of the eight artists in the running for the prize had been proposed by one of the committee members. Julian Charrière was proposed by Jérôme Sans.

Thanks to the endowment of the SAM Prize, Julian Charriere will create an installation inviting the visitor to penetrate into an enchanting volcanic landscape drawn by a series of magmatic sculptures, in which the listener will hear the primordial conversations of the Earth, thanks to an ambient sound installation. For this new Stone Speaker project to be presented at the Palais de Tokyo in 2024, he will travel to Java, Indonesia, to investigate the geothermal landscape of East Java, home to one of the world’s most active volcanoes.

In a fitting extension of his investigations of the relationship between man and nature, the artist will affirm with Stone Speaker his commitment to the preservation of our ecosystems through the poetic force that characterizes all of his work. Surrounded by researchers and local people, he will collect various materials to create an immersive space documenting the singular voices of volcanoes. By linking listening and emotional engagement, the project aims to explore what remains to be discovered and learned from these mythical natural formations.

The Stone Speaker installation proposed for the SAM Prize questions the hierarchical relationship between our species and the natural world. This, in an age of Earth rights debates and the effervescence of materialism, opens up new perspectives for understanding subjectivity beyond our species.

The seven other artists in the running for the SAM 2022 Prize, 14th edition, each for a project to a foreign country, were:

Victoire Inchauspé (Japan)

The duo Brognon and Rollin (Ecuador)

Marilou Poncin (Venezuela and Japan)

Assad Shoshan (Mexico and South Africa)

The duo Brodbeck and de Barbuat (Ecuador and Peru)

Nefeli Papadimouli (French Polynesia) 

Marie Voignier (Cameroon)

About Julian Charrière

Julian Charrière is a French-Swiss artist based in Berlin. A seminal voice in contemporary art today, marrying performance, sculpture and photography, his projects often stem from fieldwork in liminal or abandoned places. Exploring places where acute geophysical identities have been formed – from volcanoes to icefields to radioactive sites – audiences are invited to discover alternative histories and look through speculative windows into geological time. A former student of Olafur Eliasson and participant in the Institute for Spatial Experiments, Charrière frequently collaborates with scientists, engineers, art historians and philosophers. Through artistic expeditions and immersive installations, he critically deconstructs humanity’s ideas of nature, from romanticism to the Anthropocene. The interventions of his innovative practice provoke and question traditions of perception, representation and interaction with the natural world. Charrière rearranges planetary narratives for the 21st century.

Discover more at samartprojects.org