Julian Charrière: Towards No Earthly Pole

In the film Towards No Earthly Pole (2019) Julian Charrière deploys a drone’s uncanny perspective in search of a critical optic through which to encounter glacial landscapes. Under the dark of night, the camera follows a spotlight over the surfaces of glaciers and icebergs bobbing in frigid seas, illuminating silhouettes and textures of a phantom landscape. Haunted by knowledge that the earth is warming all too rapidly due to human activity, the camera’s uncanny technological gaze tracks rutted paths of meltwater, and the sublime vista of glacial waterfalls, drawing attention downward to the waterline, beneath which ninety percent of any iceberg remains submerged. Stemming from a series of expeditions to high latitudes and altitudes in the Arctic, Greenland, Iceland, the French and Swiss Alps, and Antarctica, this book’s titular video presents a unique vision of twenty-first-century glacial landscapes—a novel consideration of their mythos, delicate ecology, intensive technological mediation, and fraught geopolitical conditions. Edited by Dehlia Hannah, featuring essays by Francesca Benini, Amanda Boetzkes, Anna Katherine Brodbeck, Dehlia Hannah, Scott MacKenzie & Anna Westerstahl Stenport, Shane McCorristine, Nadim Samman, Katrin Weilenmann, and a conversation between Julian Charrière, Dehlia Hannah, and Konrad Steffen.