11 settembre

The work by Italian artist Stefano Cagol explores the significance of 9/11. In the collective memory the date is powerfully connected to the terrorist attacks in 2001 in the USA. At the same time, September 11 is also the artist’s birthday. Such an entangling of the political and the private is characteristic of Cagol’s work, which often deals with biographical events.

A list of events which have taken place on September 11, run in red neon letters on a black LED ticker display. It is a compilation that the Italian artist Stefano Cagol based on Wikipedia entries in Italian, German, and English: "I wanted a general database reflecting the collective consciousness of the world – a kind of shared and open archive in perpetual evolution."[1]

Cagol’s list begins with the end of the battle between Germanic tribes and the Romans in the Teutoburg Forest (9 CE) and concludes with the testing on September 11, 2007, in Russia of the 'father of all bombs‘, a thermobaric bomb of increased power. Cagol demonstrates that in differing countries the date has become part of national history for various reasons.

The installation »11 Settembre« was originally shown simultaneously at four different exhibition venues: in Rovereto, the artist’s place of birth, as well as in Innsbruck and Karlsruhe, together with Brussels, where the artist has a studio. The four locations represent places that have played an important part in the artist’s life.



[1] Stefano Cagol and Felicitas Rhan, »Stefano Cagol: Der 11. September ist die Mutter aller Daten!,« Monopol: Magazin für Kunst, www.monopol-magazin.de/„der-11-september-ist-die-mutter-aller-daten. Translated from the German.