STEFANO CAGOL: Far Before and After us. Golta
SPECIAL SCREENING at Kunsthall 3,14 in Bergen on 11, 12 & 13.11.2022
Opening Friday November 11th, 2022, 18:00
On 11.11.22, Kunsthall 3,14 in Bergen presents the new video work Far Before and After us. Golta that artist Stefano Cagol made during his studio-in-residence at BEK Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts at the end of June, a reflection on our relationship with nature, with the ideas of time, change and upheaval looking back to many geological eras ago and what will be after us. There will also be present a video work now on show at the Venice Biennale (pavilion of the state of Perak-Malaysia), made in the Italian Alps with the same title and created after the conception of the work in Bergen, in response to the invitation to the Biennale. The result is a diptych with the triangulation of Bergen, Malaysia and the Alps, made of rituals of light and shadow beyond space and time.
The new work in Bergen, which continues a research permeated by the first experience over ten years ago in Norway in the Arctic area of the Barents Sea, sought a confrontation with the evidence of the oldest geological eras. The rugged western coastal area off Bergen where the artist went is one of the places that most evoke the birth of the conformation of northern Europe as we know it, namely the traces of that continental collision tectonic event that scientists call the Caledonian orogeny and place between 490-390 million years ago. The rocks on the island of Golta, where the performance turned into a video work takes place, go even further back in time, belonging to the earth’s oldest era, the Precambrian. They are metamorphic rocks of magmatic origin, emerging from the earth’s crust from great depths. Here Stefano Cagol at the time of the summer solstice, illuminated by the late night sun, triggered a fire ritual, igniting the dark rocks with the light of a red signal fire as if it were incandescent lava in the hands of the artist-schaman. Before returning to the tiny presence of man in the face of nature’s grandeur.
The artist also appears to be a shaman in his poietic ability to create the work, carried out completely alone, being himself in total solitude on the island performing and filming it, controlling a drone by himself. His is also the editing, carried out at the studio-in-residence at BEK Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts.
The Biennale work of the same name in Kunsthall 3.14 was also created as a solo and evokes a land that predates human influence, as the action took place in the Dolomites mountain range in the Alps, once a tropical backdrop, now a peak of over 3,000 metres. It was created for the exhibition ‘Pear + Flora + Fauna. The Story of Indigenousness and the Ownership of History’ of the Perak state-Malaysia at the Venice Biennale. Why Stefano Cagol in the Malaysian pavilion? He is invited as the only international artist together with 6 Malaysian artists to address issues of the changing relationship to our surroundings, from an indigenous to a hegemonic attitude.
The works ‘Far Before and After us’ will also be on display at Kunsthall 3.14 in Bergen on 12 and 13 November.
“Far Before and After us. Golta” was realised as part of the studio in residence at BEK Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts.
Realisation and presentation are supported by the IIC Italian Cultural Institute in Oslo, and “Pera + Flora + Fauna. The Story of Indigenousness and the Ownership of History” is realized by Perak state of Malaysia, People of Remarkable Talents (PORT) as official collateral event 2022 of the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.
THE ARTIST
Stefano Cagol studied at the Brera Academy, Ryerson University in Toronto with a post-doctoral fellowship from the Government of Canada and works in the fields of Conceptual, Environmental, Eco and Land Art. Winner of Italian Council (2019), Visit by E.on Stiftung (2014) and Terna Prize (2009), he has participated in the Biennales of Venice (2022, 2013, 2011), Curitiba (2019), OFF Cairo (2018), Manifesta (2018, 2016, 2008), Xinjiang (2014) and Singapore (2006).