Following its 2023 prologue, the team behind the curatorial festival Stavanger Secession gathers disarticulated bodies, avant-garde histories and reflections on oil through June 21-22, 2024. CAS Editor Sofie B. Ringstad talks to the event's curator Charles Teyssou about Stavanger's particularities, internet connections, post-nuclear Japanese death dance and giant straws.

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Interview 10 June 2024  

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Sofie B. Ringstad

Tell me who you are in this context.

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Charles Teyssou

Good question! I’m Charles Teyssou, I’m French, and I work with Alexandre-Pierre Mateos. We’re a Paris-based curatorial duo, and we’ve been working around ten years together.

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SBR

How did Stavanger Secession come about?

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CT

As all good things in life, it came surprisingly out of a dinner. My collaborator Pierre Alexandre met George Ghon (an art savvy data analyst based in Stavanger) during a social gathering in Oslo, and stated speaking about doing a project together in Stavanger. When he came back to Paris, we discussed it, and with very little time we decided to do it, because we wanted to do a prologue to this year’s event already in 2023. So, the idea of Stavanger Secession came together quickly. Secession is one of the fundamental strategies of the avant-garde, when you think about the Viennese secessionism, the Munich secession and so on… the avant-garde wants to break free from tradition, conservatism. The first secessionists were against nationalism in order to invent new radical forms of art that were proportionate to the new century. Back then, secessionism was a Gesamtkunstwerk. We wanted to work around that. And then, when thinking about secessionism in Stavanger particularily, we had two things in mind: First, Lars Hertervig, who spent parts of his life in Stavanger in partial self-retreat to be able to paint his eerie landscapes. And secondly another Norwegian reference was Peter Wessel Zapffe. Zapffe was a Norwegian philosopher and the father of deep ecology who, like Lars Hertervig, removed himself partly from society – in his case through mountaineering – to think about humanity. Zapffe has had a big influence on many of the artists we invited for both the prologue and for this year. We really wanted to have a Norwegian context as the base for Stavanger Secession.

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