In conjunction with the 19th Italian Day of Contemporary Art on October 7 and through an extraordinary evening opening from 9 pm to midnight, the solo exhibition of Stefano Cagol We Are the Flood opens at the MAC Museum of Contemporary Art in Lissone, giving the cue to a multi-site development of his eponymous project on environmental issues, solitary and shared, multidisciplinary and relational, winner of the Italian Council program (12th edition, 2023).
The exhibition at MAC, curated by Francesca Guerisoli, presents a new monumental installation that will become part of the museum’s collection and will be completed later with a series of performances and video works produced by the artist in the coming months in symbolic places, from tropical rainforests to the desert, from steppes to arctic lands, moving to Egypt, Malaysia, Greenland and Kyrgyzstan, headquarters of the four partner institutions. Within the exhibition, a dozen of artworks frame the new work, including videos and installations, recent and old, which show the coherence of the artist’s research, which have faced the relationship between human being and the environment since the Nineties through deep philosophical and scientific references and immediate and evocative readings.
The work Not to Lose the Stars (2023), created involving astronauts, compares the beauty of the stars with light pollution, impalpable and diffuse as a hyperproject. In addressing immeasurable dimensions for the human being, in the two video works of the series Far Before and After Us (2022), Cagol sinks into the time of the geological evolution of the Earth, triggering fire rituals on the Alpine mountains, where he lives, and a Norwegian island, Golta. Fire becomes a symbol of the aggressive position of the human being towards what surrounds, in Antagonismus. The Time of the Flood (2020). In this work, a chemical and toxic flame generated by the artist himself penetrates, attacks and even comes into conflict with the surface of the water. The anthropogenic interferences return in two works that are distant from each other by origin and format: Flu Game of 2008 & We Are the Flood, the new monumental work protagonist of the project, both consisting of waste plastics, recycled and recyclable but synthetic, oil-derived.

The project is supported by Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program (12th edition, 2023), which aims to promote Italian contemporary art worldwide.

Cultural partner is MUSE – Museo delle Scienze di Trento. Project partners are 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.