Stefano Cagol

CB: Versatility is a vital part of your practice, reworking and reflecting on current events through an extensive artistic exploration. How do the “antennas” you use transform the museum into a “power plant”?

SC: I start from the title, from the concept, which is all-encompassing. The work I create is a means of expressing this concept, and it doesn't matter if it is a video, photography, performance, installation, or a project that is developing multiple levels. From this perspective, the museum is like a power plant where this energy is condensed and must be released outwards.

I believe in an art that communicates to the largest possible audience, translating and fearlessly addressing today's issues. Art can make truly complex issues simple, which is what the philosopher Timothy Morton defines as hyperobjects. People are against this term: simple. Yet simplicity does not mean superficiality: entering into the matter, into the concept, distilling and synthesizing it, allows you to go to the bottom without stopping at the first arduous and aesthetic layer of things. That is why the energy metaphor works. Energy illuminates with transparent logic and clarity.

CB: What does it mean to be an art explorer?

SC: Art must regain an incisive role within society, and the artist must not simply follow the masses, even if conformism reigns – but rather trace a personal path, as an explorer who penetrates a jungle or a mountaineer tackling a mountain. Like my compatriot Reinhold Messner, who freed himself from companions, oxygen, and excessive, obsolete and heavy materials. In this way, he arrived and overcame every previously unthinkable boundary.

I received two particularly striking compliments from people in the art world. Once in Cologne, someone told me that I am a thoroughbred, and another time, that I do not have a lobby that supports me, but I am the lobby because I resist, evolve, and manage to influence.

Indeed, this attitude of mine and my method based on the process and on triggering projects that develop through budding has also led me to create a contemporary art platform at the MUSE Science Museum of Trento and, within it, even to found a new public collection, launched thanks to the victory of the PAC award of the Italian Ministry of Culture, which starts with the purchase of 14 works by as many international, consolidated and emerging artists. Another award I won for the second time from the Italian Ministry of Culture, the Italian Council, now allows me to carry out the “We Are the Flood” project in Cairo, Malaysia, Greenland, and Kyrgyzstan, where I will go next month. My cultural partners are extremely interesting institutions. Further developments have emerged from the first stages: I will shortly return to Cairo to represent Italy in the exhibition organized by EUNIC, the network of European cultural institutes, and in Copenhagen, I am invited to bring a restitution of the stage carried out in Ilulissat in Greenland.

In 2006, I created my first project that crossed Europe going out from the designated spaces, and a few years later, I crossed the continent again from south to north with a beacon marking the landscape. In that case, the stops were not at museums: I compare myself with everything around me. Since 2010, in my latest projects, I have immersed myself in total solitude in nature, dialoguing with the elements: ice, fire, water, and rocks. It allows me to communicate with eras long before us and anticipate future scenarios, such as those opened by ancient ice destined to disappear quickly. In direct dialogue with the elements, it is possible to penetrate the transcendent, and the artist becomes a shaman.