Julian Charrière’s First Italian Solo Show at MAMbo Explores Nuclear Legacies and Geopolitics

Julian Charrière (born 1987 in Morges, lives in Berlin) opened his first solo exhibition at an Italian institution, MAMbo in Bologna, on June 2019. Titled 'All We Ever Wanted Was Everything and Everywhere' and curated by Lorenzo Balbi, the show transforms the Sala delle Ciminiere into an immersive underwater environment featuring shipwrecks and coconut pyramids. The exhibition draws on Charrière’s research into nuclear testing sites, particularly his month-long expedition to Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands with curator Nadim Samman. A key work, 'In the Real World It Doesn’t Happen That Perfectly' (with Julius von Bismark), involves recreating natural monuments in the Mexican desert and filming their explosion, uploaded to the internet. Another piece, 'Savannah Shed' and 'Somehow They Never Stop Doing What They Always Did', uses water from the Nile, Euphrates, and Mekong rivers to evoke geopolitical narratives. 'We Are All Astronauts' features a globe made of abrasive sand from every recognized country, with borders erased. The exhibition also includes the reprint of Charrière’s book 'As We Used to Float / Noi che galleggiavamo', which blends travel diary, fiction, and essay. Charrière’s work examines how images shape culture, often starting from the atomic bomb as a historical turning point.