Stavanger Secession is an annual curatorial festival opening its first edition on June 21st, 2024. This public, city-wide program invites artists, activists, writers, thinkers, architects, musicians and filmmakers to explore secessionism, the birth act of every avant-garde. At its core, it deals with transgression, deep ecology, sacredness, alterity and beauty. Stavanger Secession, inspired by dis
tant avant-garde meeting places like Monte Verità in Switzerland or the Black Mountain College in the USA, unites each year a group of individuals coming from various geographies and disciplines. It borrows its ethos from the dramatic nature of Norway, where the contrast between prolonged darkness and intense light can provoke profound alteration of the perception. To secede is to extricate oneself from clothes hardened by habit, to get rid of the dust that slowly accumulates on forms cast by routine. You breathe it, you eat it, you drink it, and it's so thin, so tenuous that it doesn't even crunch under your teeth. But if you stop for a second, it covers your face, your hands and then your whole existence. Secession is not a form, a place or an attitude, but a state of constant panic that merges with the irrepressible urge of the funambulist to walk the tightrope of risk. Utopian communities, strategic withdrawals, interior expeditions, philosophical mountaineering, eremitical splits, secular monasticism, voluntary disappearance, intense reverie... the act of seceding from the world, an environment or a reality has had many manifestations in the history of ideas. Reminiscent of the cinematic and literary journeys depicted in ‘Stalker’ by Andrei Tarkovsky and ‘Mount Analogue’ by René Daumal, Stavanger Secession is an exploration where the final destination is uncertain. Its “raison d’être” is to be a forum for the Dionysiac affirmation of life. Stavanger Secession is curated by Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou
