ARTIST BIO: Stefano CAGOL
Stefano Cagol (born 1969 in Trento, Italy. Lives and works in Trento, Italy) studied at the Brera Academy in Milan and Ryerson University in Toronto with a post-doctoral fellowship from the Government of Canada. His multidisciplinary practice spans video, performance, photography, installation, and curation. Addressing pressing global issues, Cagol operates at the intersection of conceptual and environmental art, Eco-Art and Land Art. He often employs natural elements, such as ice, fire, and wind, to highlight anthropogenic transformations of nature. His approach embraces timespecificity, creating siteresponsive, ritualistic performances and installations that provoke reflection on global emergencies and our place within natural systems. Cagol’s work embodies a sustained investigation into the intertwining of environment, energy flows, human bodies and politicized borders, executed through poetic, high-impact interventions. Making visible the often invisible, Cagol brings climate, ecology and geography into everyday public consciousness.
Recipient of prestigious awards, such as the Italian Council (2019) the Visit Award of E.on Stiftung, and the Terna Prize for Contemporary Art, he works in the fields of Conceptual Art, Environmental Art, Eco-Art and Land Art, reflecting for years on borders, viruses, flags and climate issues. He participated in biennials, such as the Venice Biennale (in 2011, 2013, 2022), Manifesta 11, 14th Curitiba Biennale, 2nd OFF Cairo Biennale, 1st Xinjiang Biennale, Barents Art Triennale 2013 and 1st Singapore Biennale. He held solo exhibitions at museums such as the CCA Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv (2021), MA*GA in Gallarate (2019), Galleria Civica di Trento/Mart (2016), ZKM Karlsruhe (2012) and Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (2000). In 2022, he participated in the Malaysia pavilion at the Venice Biennale; in “The State-of-the-art Science” series by the IBSA Foundation at MASI museum in Lugano (Switzerland); and he initated and continues to curate the ongoing project "We are the Flood. Liquid platform on the climate crisis, anthropocenic interactions and ecological transition” of MUSE Science Museum in Trento (Italy).
We Are The Flood
A video performance series (2022 - ongoing):
We Are the Flood: Ilulissat, Greenland (2024), 4K video, colour, sound, 8:17
We are the Flood: Ysyk-Köl, Kyrgyzstan/Kazakhstan (2024), 4K video, colour, sound, 10:40
We are the Flood: Dragon Head Dzhetyoguz, Kyrgyzstan (2024), 4K video, colour, sound, 4:19
We Are The Flood: Malaysia, Egypt (2023), 4K video, colour, sound, 10:44
In We Are the Flood, Stefano Cagol confronts the encroaching realities of climate collapse through a series of durational video performances that transform environmental crisis into symbolic action. Drawing on the biblical metaphor of the flood - not as divine punishment but as self-inflicted consequence - Cagol stages interventions in fragile landscapes, using the human body as both signal and sensor of ecological unraveling. This series, initiated in 2022, becomes a meditation on prophetic warnings long ignored, where once-hypothetical futures now saturate the present. His recurring motif—a burning flare—becomes an urgent gesture of alarm, where past scientific forecasts, present disasters, and fears for the future, collapse into one performative act. Cagol's work asks us not only to witness the aftermath, but also to recognize ourselves as both the origin and the outcome of the very flood about which we were warned.
Drawing parallels between human and planetary fragility, We Are The Flood was shot at the “four corners of the Earth”: Egypt, Malaysia, Greenland and Kyrgyzstan. Looking at what was far before us and thinking about what will be long after us, Cagol takes us with him on a journey through landscapes of futures past. Confronting human, natural and geological manifestations, he ventures into deserts, primordial jungles, and thousands-year-old icebergs, performing in front of ancient pyramids, petroglyphs and vestiges of nomadic traditions. In the course of his own nomadic practice, Cagol has developed his artistic process of serial performances in solitary dialogue with nature. Using warning flares designed to signal danger, Cagol’s interventions within these diverse landscapes are a clarion call to combat climate change; an SOS signal for a planet in crisis. What were predictions of future climate disaster in past decades, have manifested themselves as lived reality within our lifetimes: rising seas, burning forests, vanishing glaciers - rendering the once-speculative into urgent, visible truth. With his flaming red flare raised high, Cagol plays the role of a contemporary shaman. In his ubiquitous black suit, he travels from landscape to distant landscape enacting a ritual performance bringing fire to the ice, sending smoke signals from mountaintops. His performative actions, transformed into video artworks, are both poetic metaphors of the cleansing of an ailing planet, and an all too urgent cry for help – help which must arrive before the many warnings of the past turn into irreversible futures.
