What the Land Remembers: Julian Charrière and Ruinart Engage in Conversations with Nature
- Name
- Julian Charrière
- Images
- Alice Jacquemin
- Words
- Anna Dorothea Ker
On the chalky soil of Champagne, time collects in layers. Ancient sea beds, slow-growing vines, and old-world rituals compound into to a future shaped by climate, conversation, and care. Maison Ruinart, with its nearly 300-year-old history, turns again towards the natural world for its latest artistic collaboration. In 2025, the house invites Swiss-born, Berlin-based artist Julian Charrière to contribute to its ongoing series Conversations with Nature. The result is a stirring meditation on coral, collapse, and continuity.
Julian Charrière does not flinch from volatile terrain. His practice, which moves between performance, photography, video and sculpture, has taken him across shifting glaciers, radioactive sites and volcanic islands – landscapes fractured with tension. His new work for Ruinart brings that gaze to Champagne, a region whose soils are embedded with geological memory.
Charrière’s contribution to Conversations with Nature unfolds in two parts: a series of photolithographs tinted with crushed coral and local limestone pigments, and an immersive installation opening in summer 2025 at Ruinart’s new brand home in Reims. The coral forms a poetic counterpoint – a ghost of the Lutetian Sea that once blanketed the region some 45 million years ago, and a fragile warning from our own time.
“A landscape is not a passive backdrop – it responds, it listens, it changes you.”
“My work revolves around the idea of encounter,” Charrière says. “A landscape is not a passive backdrop – it responds, it listens, it changes you.” His images are still, almost silent. Reef formations rise in shadow and light, printed with the precision of scientific study but pulsing with something more bodily, more ephemeral. In the materiality of the prints – stone meeting coral, the past grinding into the present – Charrière invites us to look again at what lies underfoot.
This is not simply a decorative collaboration. Ruinart’s work with Charrière is part of a broader shift within the house: an attempt to reconcile the rituals of Champagne with the urgencies of climate, culture, and time. From its new sustainable cuvée, Blanc Singulier, to its regenerative forestry efforts in Taissy, the Maison is asking what it means to care for both craft and landscape. The collaboration with artists like Charrière – and Tomás Saraceno, Nils Udo and Eva Jospin before him – reflects a deepening sensitivity, a closer listening.
The works will be shown for the first time in Germany during Gallery Weekend Berlin, from 1-4 May 2025, at the Ruinart Champagne & Art Bar in the PalaisPopulaire, before travelling to Art Basel and Frieze Seoul. At the Ruinart Champagne & Art Bar, guests can experience a rare pairing: Champagne masterclasses together with light food pairings set against Charrière’s ghostly coral reefs. Art and viticulture – both shaped by place and time – unfold side by side.
Ruinart Champagne & Art Bar
PalaisPopulaire, Unter den Linden 5
Berlin-Mitte
1 to 4 May 2025, daily from 1pm to 9pm
Ruinart recommends massvoll-geniessen.de.
Images © Alice Jacquemin
