Julian Charrière’s artwork A Thousand Worlds, presents as a single small mirror. Made using classical mirroring techniques whereby a layer of silver is deposited on the rear of a sheet of glass, it forms a highly reflective surface. What is not evident to the viewer is that the silver used for this artwork has been recovered from thousands of discarded photographs. Through a laborious process of extraction and transformation, Charrière reclaims this silver, revealing a hidden economy of image-making, and by extension, a reflection on anthropogenic resource exploitation—a system where vast amounts of minerals, metals, and organic materials are continually extracted, destroyed, and remade to serve human needs.

A Thousand Worlds is also an intimate meditation on the relationship between the self and the act of image production. Drawing on psychology, the mirror emerges not only as a reflective surface, but as a symbolic space where identity is mined, questioned, and reframed. Assembled from the recovered remnants of countless photographs, the work becomes a collective mirror—a liquid space where individual memories and captured moments, once entangled and singular, are melted down and reconstituted into a unified reflective surface.