Greg Jager

Greg Jager’s research is articulated through interdisciplinary devices based on constant theoretical inquiry, raising questions about contemporary society, its contradictions, and its heritage, with the aim of activating the participatory construction of new ecosystems through artistic experience.
His work is not bound to formal recognizability and is configured through project-based approaches, which intersect installation, performance, editorial projects, and collective engagement, investigating possible relationships between different forms of intelligence and collaboration among them with a relational and anthropological approach.

In this context, projects such as Nigredo, Ballad of the End, Grounded, and Dismantle, Simulacrum of a Forest take shape from similar premises, such as that of a “trace.” In Nigredo, Ballad of the End, and Grounded, the performative action of participants later leaves evidence of what occurred—human footprints, excavations, and blocks of tuff. In Simulacrum of a Forest, the focus shifts from collective human intelligence to the animal superorganism, where the endemic action of the bark beetle (Ips Typographus) has altered the already corrupted ecosystem of Trentino’s forests following the Vaia storm, recording its process of colonization of the spruce. Similarly, humans, through their inhabitation, colonize and leave traces of themselves.

Among the spaces of the Third Landscape, the former Ancione S.p.a. bitumen factory stands out, where the artist conceived Dismantle during a residency in Ragusa. Through this project, he raises questions about the anthropocentric model of the world; he does so by “dismantling” the structure, collaborating with the remains of the former factory—from broken glass to iron pallets—to leave open interpretive keys to the past and infinite interpretations of the future.