“Stavanger is a city obsessed with progress, and progress and catastrophe are two sides of the same coin,” according to Pierre-Alexandre Mateos. Together with colleague Charles Teyssou, he is curating the art festival Stavanger Secession, which opens on Friday 13 June.
Inspired by philosopher Paul Virilio’s proposal for a “museum of accidents,” where he wanted to exhibit everything from natural disasters to happy coincidence, the theme for this year’s edition is accidents. “Virilio’s idea was that by exposing accidents, we are no longer just exposed to them,” Mateos told Kunstkritikk.
During their first visits to Stavanger, the curators where struck by the city’s oil industry, how what still resembles “a docile fishing village is surrounded by a high-tech infrastructure.” As a territory prone to oil spills, market collapse, and long-term financial instability, “Stavanger became a natural site to question the idea of accidents,” Mateos explained.
“We also noticed how many Norwegian artists are drawn to the erotic side of industry and technology,” Teyssou added. He mentioned Yngve Holen, Matias Faldbakken, Ida Ekblad, and Sandra Vaka, all of whom will participate in this year’s festival, and who he thinks channel “a blend of industrial rationality and poetic absurdity.”
This is the third edition of the festival, which the duo have organised since 2023, and the most ambitious one to date, featuring twenty-nine contributing artists, filmmakers, composers, and architects. The main exhibition takes place at Tou Scene, an artist-owned cultural venue in central Stavanger, and a performance program will unfold over the opening weekend. Additionally, a number of public artworks and architectural interventions have been commissioned.
Mateos observed that “one of the core aspects of accidents unfolding nowadays is that they are televised.” The intersection of catastrophe and mediation is a theme visited in a number of the works on display, for example Johan Grimonprez’s film Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), which retraces the history of airplane hijackings from the 1950s to the 1980s, and Michel Auder’s Gulf War TV War (1991/2017), where he documents himself watching news coverage of the Gulf War.
Another thematic through line is the idea of secession itself, of tearing loose. “We were fascinated by the idea of retreating from urban life and setting up a utopian community, where artists and thinkers could come together to reflect and imagine new scenarios,” Teyssou explained. He underscored how the withdrawal they are advocating is not just physical, but also intellectual, emotional, and sexual. “It’s about breaking from normalcy, tradition, and algorithmic conditioning,” he said.
Teyssou thinks that art should be a space of ambiguity rather than moral certainty, and added: “Accidents aren’t only negative, we also embrace happy accidents. They’re how children learn and how we break rules.”
