Julian Charrière's "We Are All Astronauts On a Little Space Ship Called Earth"

Even though I have a folder on my desktop with fourteen images for a sixth post on globes, Julian Charrière's We are All Astronauts... deserves its own entry. Sage Lewis posted an installation image on Instagram from the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and I haven't stopped thinking about his representation of hanging spheres since.

From Charrière's website:

Medium: 13 found globes made of plastic, paper and wood, steel base with MDF board; dust from globes surface and international mineral sandpaper

"We Are All Astronauts On a Little Spaceship Called Earth, whose title is inspired by the writing of Buckminster Fuller, is composed of 13 abraded world globes, which seem to be floating over a table. The globes date from 1890 to 2011, and the artist has sanded their successive and shifting geopolitical contours until their carefully drawn territories disappeared from their surfaces.To do so, he created a special, 'international sandpaper' with mineral samples from all UN recognized countries, a remnant from one of his previous works, Monument - Sedimentation of Floating Worlds (2013). The dust carried by the abrasion gently settled on the table beneath the globes, creating new, yet to be defined cartographies."

More images of his studio (with pristine globes) can be found here and while this is a link to a sanded globe displayed as a solitary sculpture.