This summer, Swiss-French artist Julian Charrière will transform Basel’s historical department store Globus, currently under renovation, with a boundary pushing artwork that aims to connect visitors across vast distances, bridging mountainous Switzerland with a Western Andean Cloud Forest in Ecuador. A radical intervention in public space, it invites the citizens and visitors of Basel to become participants and protectors, lending their voices to one of Earth’s critical carbon sinks and biodiversity hotspots.

Calls for Action is the second iteration of the “Globus Public Art Project”. During the three-year renovation of its iconic department store on Basel’s market square, Globus is collaborating with the Fondation Beyeler on inviting artists to conceive and realize new site-specific works of art that engage with the building and the public.

Julian Charrière’s Calls for Action brings together public art with land conservation, opening a live feed between the city of Basel and a Western Andean Cloud Forest in Ecuador to highlight the interconnectivity of our planet, along with the environmental issues that threaten such vital ecosystems. Featuring a large screen suspended on the department store façade, the project acts as a real-time window into the rich biodiversity of an endangered ecoregion. Encouraging communication and interaction, a phone booth has been installed on the market square, wherein visitors can pick up a phone to both listen and talk to this far removed ecosystem. Fostering a more intimate connection between the city and the jungle, Calls for Action thus proposes an encounter beyond mere spectatorship, whereby speaking into the rainforest we can also speak out on its behalf.

Through this collective experience, Julian Charrière seeks to create new planetary bonds beyond the boundaries of our immediate surroundings, showing how art can be a tool for connecting with environmental issues beyond our everyday lives. In the process it brings to the foreground urgent concerns regarding deforestation, environmental stewardship and the sustainable management of rainforests.  

Julian Charrière (b. 1987) is a French-Swiss artist based in Berlin. A seminal voice in contemporary art, Charrière has been widely exhibited across esteemed institutions and museums around the globe. Marshalling performance, sculpture and photography, his projects often stem from remote fieldwork in liminal or discarded locations, such as volcanoes, ice fields and radioactive sites. By encountering places where acute geophysical identities have formed, Charrière speculates on alternative histories, often looking at materials through the lens of deep geological time. Exploring how our ideas of nature have changed from the Romantic movement into the Anthropocene, his projects deconstruct the cultural traditions which govern how we perceive and represent the natural world.