Stefano Cagol: Smoke and Fire as Artistic Materials

For over twenty years, Stefano Cagol has been working with themes that have become central to contemporary art: the climate crisis, energy, borders, technology, and the place of humans in a changing world. But unlike many artists who address environmental issues, he is not interested in nature per se. His practice begins where the conventional separation between humans and the environment ceases to hold. A graduate of the Accademia di Brera in Milan and Ryerson University in Toronto, and a participant in three Venice Biennales, Manifesta 11, Noor Riyadh, the OFF Cairo Biennale, and many other international projects, Cagol has long explored ecology not as a standalone topic, but as a new reality in which politics, energy, technology, climate, and geography intertwine. His projects rarely illustrate environmental issues. Instead, the artist creates situations in which the viewer is literally confronted with the consequences of human presence in the world. Ice, smoke, fire, water, light, satellite technology, drones, and remote landscapes become the materials for unique artistic experiments, where the familiar landscape ceases to be a backdrop and begins to speak of time, responsibility, and the scale of human impact. The artist himself says: ❝I took the biblical episode of the great flood as a metaphor for the anthropogenic interference with nature. This starting point brought me to the following statement: 'We are global warming. We are the pandemic. We are the flood.❞ This thought permeates many of his works. Stefano Cagol constantly shifts his perspective from the catastrophe as an external event to humans as its direct participants. For him, the climate crisis is not a plot about the future or an abstract environmental problem, but a condition within which we already live. This is why his projects often appear not in museum spaces, but among glaciers, deserts, seas, mountain ranges, or on political borders—where change becomes physically tangible. Working with performance, video, installation, and site-specific practices, Stefano Cagol combines scientific research with artistic expression, transforming complex planetary processes into the viewer's personal experience. His art offers no ready-made answers and does not seek to moralize. Rather, it shifts the perspective, forcing us to see that humans have long ceased to exist separately from nature. They themselves have become one of its most powerful forces.