The Vajont Dam (or Vaiont Dam) is a disused dam, completed in 1959 in the valley of the Vajont river under Monte Toc, 100 km north of Venice, Italy. A 1963 landslide caused the overtopping of the dam and around 2,000 deaths.

One of the tallest dams in the world, it is 262 m (860 ft) high, 27 m (89 ft) thick at the base and 3.4 m (11 ft) at the top. Its 1963 overtopping was caused when the designers ignored the geological instability of Monte Toc on the southern side of the basin. Warning signs and negative appraisals during the early stages of filling were disregarded, and the attempt to complete the filling led to a landslide, which created a wave that brought massive flooding and destruction to the Piave valley below, wiping out several villages completely.

On 12 February 2008, while launching the International Year of Planet Earth, UNESCO cited the Vajont Dam tragedy as one of five "cautionary tales", caused by "the failure of engineers and geologists".

The dam was built by SADE (Società Adriatica di Elettricità, English: Adriatic Energy Corporation), the electricity supply and distribution monopolist in North-Eastern Italy. The owner, Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata, had been Mussolini's Minister of Finances for several years. The 'tallest dam in the world', across the Vajont gorge, was conceived in the 1920s to meet the growing demands for industrialization, but not until the confusion after Mussolini's fall during World War II was the project authorized on 15 October 1943.

Vajont is a town and comune in the province of Pordenone, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, north-eastern Italy.

The municipality was founded in 1971 on the municipal territory of Maniago. It was built to host the people evacuated from Erto e Casso after the disaster of the Vajont Dam (1963).

Media related to Vajont at Wikimedia Commons

Stefano Cagol (Trento, September 11, 1969) is an Italian contemporary artist living in Italy, Brussels and New York City. He works with video, photography and installation. The images in his photographic and video works are often turned upside down.

Cagol was born in Trento. He studied at the Institute of Art in Trento, the Academy of Fine Arts in Brera, Milan and at the Ryerson University in Toronto, where he was a post-doctoral fellow. He also attended the Internationale Sommerakademie für Bildende Kunst in Salzburg and the ICP-International Center of Photography in New York. He was artist in residence at the Künstlerhaus in Salzburg, at the Leube Group Art's Program of Gartenau, Austria, at the IOR in London in 2003 and in 2005, at International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), New York, in 2010, and at BAR International by Pikene på Broen, in Kirkenes, Norway, between 2010 and 2011. In 1998 he took part in the Marshall McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology in Toronto.

Cagol had a solo show at MART - Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto in 2000. His public art intervention "Artists' bridges" took place in Bolzano 2002. In 2004 he exhibited at Superdeluxe in Tokyo and the Stefan Stux Gallery project room in New York. In June–September 2005 he had a solo exhibition, "Babylon Zoo" at the Oredaria Gallery in Rome (with a critical essay by Pier Luigi Tazzi). In June 2005 he made a site specific installation in the hall of the Faculty of Sociology in Trento. In January 2005 he held a solo exhibition in London at Platform titled "LIES" (catalogue with a critical essay by Mami Kataoka).