Calls for Action is both a playful and critical intervention, showing the importance of emotional connection to environmental action. Though Earth’s primordial forests act as important carbon sinks and home to vibrant biodiverse communities of life, few people have had the opportunity to experience them first-hand. I wanted to create an opportunity for the public to intimately engage with endangered ecosystems and to hear their own voices within them. It is a reminder that our presence is felt even in places we imagine are remote. Everything is connected, and there is no place that does not feel the consequences of human action, as well as inaction. Calls for Action is an encounter with this reality, but also with the possibility that if we act with intention, if we put our voices together, we can support and regrow what which might otherwise have been silently lost.

— Julian Charrière

Calls for Action marks a new initiative by French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière, who in a series of participatory interventions bridges the world of contemporary art with large-scale forest conservation. Consisting of two-way livestreams between cultural institutions and endangered natural landscapes, Calls for Action stages an encounter beyond mere spectatorship where through the act of listening and speaking into the forest, we can also speak out on its behalf.

Each iteration is unique and site-specific, responding to the history and ecology of the distinct locations it brings together. A permanent feature of the artwork is the presence of a telephone, through which a dialogue can be established between city and forest. In the latter, omnidirectional microphones are installed to capture local soundscapes, while a small speaker projects speech from the museum visitors. In order to not disturb wildlife, the sound is set below human speech levels, matching that of bird song. Through this interaction, the public is invited to a both playful and radical intervention, becoming both participants and protectors that can lend their voices to some of Earth’s most endangered environments.

For the Boston Public Art Triennial, Julian Charrière brings Calls for Action to Massachusetts, creating a dialogue between Boston, a city home to the largest Brazilian community in the United States, and the threatened rainforests of the Brazilian Southern Amazon.

The public is invited to engage as both participants and protectors, raising awareness of deforestation, environmental well-being, and the urgent need for supporting local actors working to protect intact forests. The project extends beyond an emotional connection, directly supporting conservation efforts and offering the public a tangible way to participate in these initiatives. This iteration of Calls for Action supports efforts to legally recognize and protect up to 3.7 million acres of Indigenous Territories, home to charismatic species like the South American tapir, spider monkeys, and the mighty jaguar. These currently undesignated lands are among the last strongholds of Brazil’s native forests. Indigenous peoples stewardship have limited deforestation to 1.2% of their own native vegetation over the past three decades, accounting for just 0.9% of Brazil’s total forest loss despite mounting threats.

In collaboration with Art into Acres, Re:wild, and local partners, the project helps raise funds for critical studies and demarcation efforts to secure tenure of these lands for the Indigenous peoples living there, helping protect biological and cultural diversity in perpetuity. The initiative reinforces Brazil’s zero-deforestation commitment, safeguarding both the land and the Indigenous communities who have preserved it for centuries. It is a joint effort with the Brazilian Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, the National Foundation for Indigenous Peoples, and regional conservation organizations. In Boston, the video feed will showcase a part of the Amazon rainforest within the Refúgio de Vida Silvestre dos Rios São Benedito e Azul, a protected area in one of the most threatened regions of the Southern Amazon. This area, a global biodiversity hotspot, faces severe threats from deforestation, land grabbing, and extractive activities.

JULIAN CHARRIÈRE is a Swiss-French artist based in Berlin, engages with the cultural and environmental histories embedded within natural landscapes. His works collapse geological and human timescales, revealing the slow and often invisible forces that shape and reshape both terrains and historical imaginaries. Spanning film, sculpture, photography, and installation, his multidisciplinary practice is marked by immersive projects grounded in fieldwork within ecologically and symbolically charged sites—glaciers, volcanoes, nuclear test zones, and deep-sea ecosystems. Through these intimate encounters with fragile environments, Charrière explores how human activity inscribes itself into the fabric of the planet, subtly altering its surfaces, atmospheres, and futures. Fusing scientific observation with speculative poetics, his works foreground landscapes as physical processes, repositories of memory, and vessels of cultural imagination. Rather than illustrating environmental crises directly, Charrière creates spaces where wonder and disquiet coexist, allowing viewers to experience the contradictions and tensions of our contemporary condition. His practice probes the colonial and extractivist legacies embedded within acts of exploration, landscape representation, and the technologies of seeing.

Massachusetts has been an incredible example of nature rebounding. Growing up in Acton, I witnessed the recovery of many of the state’s forests that had been heavily logged from European colonization to the time of Henry David Thoreau and his writings about our deep connection to nature, to the massive cleanup of the heavily polluted Boston Harbor, to the return of wildlife such as Wild Turkeys and Black Bears. Nature is center to the progress of society, and this exhibit by the famed artist Julian Charrière connects the threads from Bay State to the Amazon.

— Dr. Wes Sechrest, Founder and CEO of Re:wild

ART INTO ACRES is an artist-founded, non-profit initiative that supports large-scale land conservation with a focus on biodiversity and Indigenous Peoples-led efforts. Alongside the support of artists, galleries and institutions, and in collaboration with matching fund partners, Art into Acres has supported the permanent conservation of millions of hectares of tropical and boreal forest to date. Projects are locally-led and based on community-voiced interests.

RE:WILD is a global organization supporting environmental causes around the world. Founded by a group of renowned conservation scientists together with Leonardo DiCaprio and combining more than 35 years of conservation impact, Re:wild is a force multiplier that brings together Indigenous peoples, local communities, influential leaders, nongovernmental organizations, governments, companies, and the public to protect and rewild at the scale and speed we need.

The first iteration of Calls for Action was realised in partnership with Art into Acres, Re:wild, and in local collaboration with the Ecuadorian non-profit Fundatión Jocotoco in 2024. This iteration marked the beginning of a long-term commitment to supporting the permanent conservation of threatened ecosystems, showing how art can be a tool for foregrounding issues of urgent ecological concern, from deforestation to environmental stewardship and sustainable forest management.

Set in Ecuador and focused on regions ranked as so-called key biodiversity hotspots, these sites which while having lost more than 70% of their primary vegetation, are host to thousands of unique species, many of them endemic and endangered, occurring nowhere else on Earth. Representing some of the wettest areas in the world, the sites are habitat to Great Green Macaws, Brown-headed Spider Monkeys, Black-breasted Pufflegs, White-lipped Peccaries, Harpy Eagles, Banded Ground Cuckoos, Geoffroys’s Tamarins, Tapirs, and Pumas, amon many others. Beyond being home to a rich variety of animals and plants, coastal and cloud foests of this nature also play an integral role in sequestering carbon and maintaining a stable hydrological cycle, thus enacting a vital purpose in the natural mitigation of climate change.

FUNDACIÓN JOCOTOCO protects irreplaceable regions that are essential to maintain life on earth owing to their uniqueness and high concentration of biodiversity. On just 40,000 ha, Jocotoco protects 11% of all bird species in the world. Dozens of plants, reptiles, and amphibians have found their sole refuge in Jocotoco’s reserves, occurring nowhere else. Jocotoco treasures its deep connection to nature. What makes Jocotoco different from other organizations are the ‘boots on the ground,’ 80% of its 124 staff lice around the reserves.

FONDATION BEYELER AND GLOBUS partnered with Julian Charrière for the first iteration of Calls for Action, opening a live feed between Basel, Switzerland and a Western Andean Cloud Forest in Ecuador. Presented as the second iteration of the ‘Globus Public Art Project’ the live feed is screened in large on the façade of the iconic department store, a site which throughout an ongoing three-year renovation plan is commissioning temporary public artworks. In this version of Calls for Action, a phone booth has been installed on the marketplace below the screen, wherein visitors could both listen to and speak with an ecosystem from which we are not only physically but at times emotionally disengaged from. The ”Globus Public Art Project” is curated by Samuel Leuenberger and was on view from 8 June until 6 October 2024.

MUSEUM FRIEDER BURDA In the second iteration of Calls for Action Julian Charrière joined forces with Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden, Germany, restaging the work as an immersive and participatory experience inside of the gallery. Bringing together the institution, located in the mythical Black Forest wilderness with a Coastal Forest in Ecuador, Calls for Action is on view as part of the museum’s 20th anniversary exhibition ‘I Feel the Earth Whipser’ alongside Bianca Bondi, Sam Falls and Ernesto Neto. Curated by Patricia Kamp and Jérôme Sans, it was on display from 14 June until 3 November 2024.

Julian Charrière, Calls for Action, 2024 Behind the scenes in Western Andean Cloud Forest, Ecuador Copyright the artist; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany Photographer: Alcuin Stevenson