Julian Charrière brings the sounds of the ocean to Ruinart’s chalk cellars in Reims

To descend into the crayères – the vast chalk cellars lurking underneath champagne house Ruinart’s home in Reims – is to enter another, ancient world. Steeped in history, the layers of white chalk, composed of an ancient limestone sediment, tell a story of a time millions of years ago when the region was covered by sea.

It is a rich geological heritage on which Ruinart is drawing for a collaboration with Franco-Swiss, Berlin-based artist Julian Charrière, who considers the implications of time in a multisensory installation that links to today’s concerns over the consequences of global warming.

‘Culture doesn’t float above ecology; it emerges from it,’ says Charrière. ‘The ways we build, remember, mythologise, and forget – these are not detached from the material world, but are intimately entangled with it.’ He is keen to unite the worlds of environmental science and culture in his work Chorals, an immersive sound and light installation.

‘​​In the case of Chorals, the crayères embody this entanglement [between the two worlds],’ he adds. ‘They are anthropogenic voids carved into what was once an ancient seabed: chalk formed from the compressed bodies of marine life, sedimented over geological epochs. By reintroducing oceanic soundscapes into this hollowed architecture, the installation collapses time. It activates a kind of acoustic haunting, where the memory of the sea echoes through a space we’ve come to associate with stillness, or even silence. A choral lament, maybe, carried on the breath of marine time.’

Charrière, who learned to dive so he could better study underwater environments, recorded the sounds underwater, including the noises of the fish, coral and currents, during his dives in the marine ecosystem. Later, he also added recordings gathered by marine biologists from around the world. Underground in the crayères, these sounds are synchronised with a wave machine which produces ripples in a shallow pool of water.

‘For me, sound is a way of mapping presence, of drawing attention to what’s otherwise invisible, or overlooked,’ Charrière says.’ In the case of the crayères, the echo isn’t just a metaphor, it’s a material phenomenon. The walls themselves, composed of compressed marine sediment, respond to sound in a very specific way. You don’t just hear an echo, you feel it travel through your body, like the stone is speaking back. It creates a space where sound becomes a kind of archaeology. But unlike a clean reflection, an echo is always slightly degraded. It reminds us that memory isn’t a perfect record – it’s porous, shaped by loss and distortion.’

But an echo chamber, Charrière points out, can also suggest what isn’t being heard. By refusing to impose a narrative on the space, he ensures the focus remains firmly on the sonic worlds of the coral reefs. ‘People often associate coral with vibrant colour, but what frequently goes unnoticed is their sonic richness,’ he adds. ‘These ecosystems crackle and pulse with life – fish vocalisations, crustacean clicks, the static hum of micro-organisms – a living choral composition in constant flux. Reintroducing those frequencies into the crayères became a way to invoke the ghost of a former sea. The installation transformed into an echo chamber where distant epochs converge, a space in which time collapses and matter remembers. It’s less a reconstruction than a resonance, a way for marine memory to vibrate, once again, within stone.’

ruinart.com