Stefano Cagol: Archeology of the Anthropocene. Far Before and After Us
C+N Canepaneri, Milan
Milan | ItalyAn exhibition that looks at the idea of time beyond the human being is Stefano Cagol's second solo show at C+N Gallery CANEPANERI.
The artist decided to take up the abused definition of the era of the human being to peruse its end, imagining a world in which anthropogenic interferences continue their course even after us, an era close to its end and already ancient. While scientists are still busy naming processes, searching for markers and attempting to date this geological epoch, competing between those who make the Anthropocene begin with nuclear power, the industrial revolution or agriculture, the artist sees it as coinciding with our own origin, with an evolutionary moment of distinction from other species: the control of fire. Even right from the start, we were like we are now: beautiful and ingenious beings, but also very arrogant and aggressive with everything and everyone. Even then, our impact began; anthropogenicity is a hyperobject, being time- and space-transgressive. The Anthropocene, which sounds so connected to the present and the future, sinks viscously into our most remote past.
Stefano Cagol evokes this time in some twenty sculptural, installation, video, photographic and sound works through the conceptual presence of single elements, fire, the once eternal ice, migrating matter, alpine rocks that were once tropical bottoms, metamorphic polymers and radiation as if they were part of our geological stratum. The result is a kind of stratigraphy, neither linear nor descriptive. It recalls different moments in the human era, the age of fossil fuels and plastic, the age of the atomic bomb, and reaching back to periods long before and after us. In a glimpse between origin, end (and beyond), temporality is also the duration – of glaciers thousands of years old, polythene that lasts a thousand, radioactive nuclear explosions for a million years and our impact that will outlive us. In this dimension, the artist places himself between light and dark in shamanic and divinatory solitude.
An exhibition that looks at the idea of time beyond the human being is Stefano Cagol's second solo show at C+N Gallery CANEPANERI.
The artist decided to take up the abused definition of the era of the human being to peruse its end, imagining a world in which anthropogenic interferences continue their course even after us, an era close to its end and already ancient. While scientists are still busy naming processes, searching for markers and attempting to date this geological epoch, competing between those who make the Anthropocene begin with nuclear power, the industrial revolution or agriculture, the artist sees it as coinciding with our own origin, with an evolutionary moment of distinction from other species: the control of fire. Even right from the start, we were like we are now: beautiful and ingenious beings, but also very arrogant and aggressive with everything and everyone. Even then, our impact began; anthropogenicity is a hyperobject, being time- and space-transgressive. The Anthropocene, which sounds so connected to the present and the future, sinks viscously into our most remote past.
Stefano Cagol evokes this time in some twenty sculptural, installation, video, photographic and sound works through the conceptual presence of single elements, fire, the once eternal ice, migrating matter, alpine rocks that were once tropical bottoms, metamorphic polymers and radiation as if they were part of our geological stratum. The result is a kind of stratigraphy, neither linear nor descriptive. It recalls different moments in the human era, the age of fossil fuels and plastic, the age of the atomic bomb, and reaching back to periods long before and after us. In a glimpse between origin, end (and beyond), temporality is also the duration – of glaciers thousands of years old, polythene that lasts a thousand, radioactive nuclear explosions for a million years and our impact that will outlive us. In this dimension, the artist places himself between light and dark in shamanic and divinatory solitude.
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