We Are the Flood. Ilulissat

Stefano Cagol, We Are the Flood. Ilulissat, Greenland.


Stefano Cagol's rituals are a little mystical and shamanic, a little punk, a little exorcising, between fire and ice. At times, he could recall a contemporary wanderer like Caspar David Friedrich, but with a smoke bomb in his right hand and a drone remote control in his left. The shrewd humanity contemplates corners of paradise that resist and plays between balance and a devastating impact.

Stefano Cagol (Trento, 1969) sees the artist back from a stop in Greenland. «The unstoppable transformations push us to shift our gaze and heart to the entire world, to the planet that hosts us. I went all the way to the Arctic, Cagol says, to dialogue with the icebergs, millennial ice, islands as imposing as mountains, but extremely fragile and ephemeral, one of the places on the planet under the greatest stress due to our unstoppable impact». The video is the result of an extensive and demanding multi-site project based on a personal process method made up of serial performances, all realized in the first person, alone and in direct contact with nature. The artist has chosen and reached different places on the planet, in addition to Greenland, symbolic ones such as Egypt, Malaysia and Kyrgyzstan, pushing himself far from the signs of current civilization to immerse himself in times long before us, in comparison with geological, natural and human manifestations. In profoundly different scenarios he has implemented metaphorical actions of what is the contemporary human being, represented in the videos as a foreign and rather aggressive presence, in a sea of dark artificial fog or with spray cans of sweet perfume that reveal themselves as weapons of fire like the ferocious jaws of dragons. The food for thought triggered by the artworks are many, also raised by the different anthropic contexts touched, characterized by cultures of the past, minor or in danger of extinction, threatened by our voracity, starting from the ancient Egyptian culture, the Malay tribes, the tradition of the ancient Kyrgyz people, nomads like the human being of the origins, and the Inuit people.


We are the Flood is realized with support of the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture as part of the Italian Council (12th Edition 2023), the international promotion program for Italian contemporary art. They are part of the collection of the MAC Museum for Contemporary Art in Lissone and for their realization the cultural partner and co-financier was the MUSE Science Museum Trento, while the project partners were Ilulissat Art Museum / Arctic Culture Lab, Ilulissat, Greenland; Darb 1718, Contemporary Art & Culture Center, Cairo, Egypt; Port – People of Remarkable Talent, Ipoh, Perak, Malaysia; B’Art Contemporary, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.
An essay by Gabriele Valente completes the exhibition.

Stefano Cagol (Trento, 1969), is an Italian artist who has been working for years in the fields of Conceptual Art, Environmental Art, Eco-Art and Land Art, exhibiting in museums such as the CCA Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv and the ZKM in Karlsruhe, and in biennales that include Manifesta 11, the 14th Curitiba Biennial, the 1st Singapore Biennial and, in 2011, 2013 and 2022, the Venice Biennale.