Julian Charrière: Breathe: MONA

Commissioned by Mona as a permanent installation, Breathe forms the conceptual and geological heart of Hard Core. Built into the museum's foundations, the work releases oxygen molecules trapped within banded iron ore formations since the Great Oxidation Event approximately 2.4 billion years ago.

Using a custom-built apparatus, Charrière extracts oxygen from ancient rock and invites visitors to inhale air that has remained locked within the Earth's geological record since oxygen first transformed life on the planet. The work collapses vast stretches of time into a direct bodily experience, connecting the act of breathing to processes that predate humanity by billions of years.

Part sculpture, part scientific instrument and part philosophical proposition, Breathe exemplifies Charrière's practice of revealing hidden relationships between human existence and planetary systems. By making deep time physically perceptible, the work transforms an invisible geological phenomenon into an encounter that is at once intimate, poetic and profoundly unsettling.