Diego Marcon’s Films Conjure a Familiar, Grotesque World
An artist whose film work revels in the futile, horrifying and absurdly humorous
An artist whose film work revels in the futile, horrifying and absurdly humorous
In the summer of 2018, Diego Marcon travelled to Austria to visit the home museum of the writer Thomas Bernhard, whose work he admires for its wry bleakness. ‘No one makes me laugh like him,’ Marcon tells me. Like Bernhard, Marcon is often seen as an investigator of the warped and the grotesque. His disturbing short films have featured executed youths, shattered families and anthropomorphic moles endlessly totting up sums like senile accountants, while their pups lie sick. Marcon and Bernhard also share a strong fascination with looping, rejecting narrative and an aesthetic precision that exposes the futility of control. At Bernhard’s house, Marcon was particularly struck by the guest bedroom: tastefully decorated with a veneer of cosiness, it was furnished with beds too short for anyone to sleep in. ‘No one could ever have actually stayed the night,’ Marcon says, delightedly. Over the course of our correspondence, which spanned various Zooms and emails and at times felt like being trapped in one of Marcon’s strange and spiralling films, he mentioned the beds several times. The room resonated with him, reflecting his own desire simultaneously to entice and repel.
His 2017 work Monelle was shot inside the Casa del Fascio (Fascist Headquarters, 1936) in Como, Italy, infamous for both the austerity of Giuseppe Terragni’s design and its political connotations. Almost nothing happens in Monelle, save for occasional flashes of light accompanied by loud pops that reveal young girls and glimpses of violence: bodies are dragged across the ground or pushed off balconies. Yet, it is punctuated by an upbeat and humorous trumpet score by Federico Chiari, a composer Marcon has collaborated with since high school.
It’s very important for me to remember that what I do is super small and specific.
When we spoke in December last year, Marcon was preparing to rehearse a new film: Krapfen. As always, he told me, his starting point would be ‘structure and language’ rather than ‘meaning or storytelling’. His interests encompass both the codes of mass culture – the archetypes that define different cinematic genres, from horror to melodrama – and technical filmmaking; he has explored CGI, prosthetics and animatronics, among others.
Marcon tells me that he frequently reflects on the futility of art. ‘It’s very important for me to remember that what I do is super small and specific,’ he says. He describes the work as ‘a mouth’, an idea he got from sneaking into a class led by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben while studying at the IUAV University, Venice. ‘For our body, the mouth has a very specific function: to eat food and to have a voice,’ Marcon says. ‘But what happens when you kiss or perform oral sex? It’s no longer utilitarian; it opens the dimension of love and pleasure. So, art is a bit like the mouth used in this way. And it’s a privilege to use it that way.’ With that privilege, he adds, comes room for imagining new and more startling truths, about entertainment, power and the fraught contemporary condition.
Marcon’s gallerist, Sadie Coles, first encountered his work at the 2022 Venice Biennale, where he showed The Parents’ Room (2021), a looping film in which dead family members sing about being slain by their father. ‘I took the life of my little son’, croons the dad, who, we learn, has committed suicide after the murders. Coles found herself sitting through it several times, stunned. ‘You hear this beautiful soundtrack, which, along with the picturesque imagery, lulls you into this false sense of security,’ she tells me. ‘But then, when you start to listen to the words, it’s about an absolute horror of taboo-crushing social behaviour.’
In person, Marcon strays between intensity and a merry sweetness, even a child-like modesty.
Marcon’s films linger in the mind because of their attention to detail. In Fritz (2024), a young CGI boy hangs from a noose in an eerie stone shed and appears to die – he grabs his neck, grimaces – but then continues to sing, stuck permanently between life and death in a yodelling purgatory. The CGI background was built using images of Marcon’s own woodshed at his country house in Brinzio, which he bought partly to serve as a ‘mausoleum’ for his props and models. ‘A place to bury myself in’, he adds. Like many of Marcon’s video works, Fritz loops, and the gesture that always catches the eye is a small kick – a shove off the wall – which he does shortly after his ‘death’: a gesture so recognizably juvenile that the accuracy of its representation is awfully tender. These moments, which run across Marcon’s work, suggest that the roots of heartbreak or shame lie not in general biography, but in shard-like images that embed and fester in the mind over years – a petty faux-pas our parents made, say, that rendered them small in the eyes of others – and the consequent realization that in such details lie the strata of class and hierarchy. Marcon calls such memories ‘the wounds’: cuts that drain the body not mercifully and quickly, but painfully over time.
In person, Marcon strays between intensity and a merry sweetness, even a child-like modesty. Nearly 40, he lives alone. He often wears a pulled-up hoodie, which gives him the look of one of the animatronic moles from his film Dolle (2023). Despite children being the main theme in his work, the artist does not want any of his own, preferring to conclude his biological lineage as a ‘dead end’. For many years, while trying to make it as an artist, Marcon didn’t take commercial film jobs to fund his practice lest it allowed ‘dark forces to enter [his] work’. Instead, he made extra income as a cleaner, a babysitter and a waiter in an Italian restaurant where the owner would have staff wash mould off the ravioli. Today, in his spare time, between listening to crime podcasts and watching films, he likes to eat small cakes, the merits of which he occasionally described to me by email. He suffers from hypochondria, becoming fixated by a spot on his hand or a tugging feeling within his body. He has a habit of smiling, widely, even when saying things that are objectively sad or unsettling. Coles recalled being surprised at their first meeting to encounter ‘a sweet little guy from Milan.’ She thought of his work: ‘Where does it come from?’
Marcon was born in Busto Arsizio, a Northern Italian town he claims was once voted one of the worst places to live in Italy. His parents were ‘workers’ he says: his mother was an office worker (impiegata) at a factory, while his father worked as a mechanic (operaio). He adds that it was an uncultured upbringing. Yet, he often cites his childhood as the root of his creative interests. After his parents’ divorce, his father would take him to the cinema at weekends. Some of the blockbusters he watched then lie at the heart of his explorations into genre today. His mother loved to read thrillers, which she would order from a catalogue. Occasionally, an offer would come for a free book. Once she let Marcon, then aged 13, choose. He picked one on modern painting, only to feel a strong ‘disturbance’ on viewing Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass, 1862), in which a female nude picnics with two clothed men. He was struck by the intensity of her gaze and ‘this very soft body; you can feel the warmth of it’. It was a very erotic moment, he remembers. He decided then that he wanted to be an artist.
Several times, Marcon discusses with me the complex shame he feels about his background. He believes that class is central to his work but was vague in expanding, telling me he preferred instead to talk about interpersonal relationships, which is exactly what his films are about. He does not believe in ‘cross-class’ relations, he tells me, and relays the story of a friend who fell in love with a connected and affluent girl, and intended to profess his affections to her. Marcon warned his friend against it: he would not just be having a relationship with her, but also her people, her power. ‘She had this huge penis,’ he says, ‘whereas his would always be tiny.’
Marcon’s films submerge us in a place beyond – or before – right and wrong.
Some of Marcon’s early works feature scenes related to his upbringing. TINPO (2006) shows footage of his young cousins rampaging with a toy gun, edited into a relentless cacophony of violence. Another work, She Loves You (2008), features Marcon’s Aunt Claudia discussing her obsession with The Beatles. The work has none of the emotional and moral vagaries of later films: the focus is loneliness, self-delusion. For many years, Marcon chose not to disclose the subjects’ relationships to himself, partly because he didn’t want to be associated with what he saw as a trend in autobiographical works, and partly because he found the disclosure made people moderate their reactions. ‘They feel sorry; they are concerned.’ His own fascination with Claudia has to do with her ‘cinematic’ quality – an innate ability to perform in a sentimental and tragic key. In his aunt’s fantasies of John Lennon or George Harrison, Marcon saw ‘the overlapping ambiguity between imagined and real worlds’. He links these aspects to his later interest in the lines between representation and reality, and his blending of cinematic techniques: human actors with prosthetic masks; silicone mannequins with CGI eyes. The ambiguity he cultivates extends to morality. His films submerge us in a place beyond – or before – right and wrong. Perhaps this, too, relates to childhood. In his work, we relive the amoral world of infancy, where anything is possible, no matter how violent or weird.
To interpret class in Marcon’s films is to find two separate notions circling. On the one hand, his films reject boundaries, refusing the norms of a so-called polite society. On the other, they show people trapped in situation and pathology, unable to connect or relate. In La Gola (2024), two lovers – Gianni and Rossana – exchange letters that ignore each other’s needs or words. Instead, they write only of their own obsessions: in the case of Rossana, her mother’s descent into dementia; for Gianni, it’s a fancy meal he is about to eat. The couple’s feelings of melancholy and isolation are presented as inevitable constants rather than something that can be overcome. In Marcon’s films, no one learns anything. Communication is sparse or meaningless. Characters rarely touch, except violently. No one heals. No one moves on. The sums are always wrong. Each loop enhances the inescapability. The viewer is enraptured but claustrophobic (an affliction Marcon also suffers from).
If you think about the money we put in, the effort just to make this film, it’s violent as a thought.
Tellingly, Marcon sees his most violent film as Dolle, in which the animatronic counting moles keep messing up their numbers. ‘It doesn’t have anything to grasp,’ he says. ‘It’s really mute, deaf, blind. It goes on and on, again and again, always wrong. If you think about the money we put in, the effort just to make this film, it’s violent as a thought.’ True violence, to Marcon, is not the obviousness of physical harm, but the revelation of emptiness and inevitability, and the ability to make others marinate in them without the comforting hand of narrative or explanation, without the promise of a way out.
Later this year, Marcon will unveil Krapfen (2025), a looping, four-minute musical which takes its name from one of his favourite delicacies: a German jam doughnut. A youth – played by a female dancer, Violet Savage, who Marcon selected because she looks like a ‘young boy’ – appears in a bedroom, taunted by singing clothes. ‘Why don’t you eat your Krapfen? They are your favourite. Come on, eat it!’ the garments implore. The clothes have their own personalities: the headscarf motherly, the gloves meddling, the trousers sexual and thrusting. They dance in a melee, tormenting the youth – who is depicted as a real human, free from prosthetics or CGI – until they collapse back onto the bed, where the process begins again. The doughnut itself is nowhere to be found. A menace or a treat? Who knows.
Marcon and I discuss how the film nods to Disney and its history of characterful singing furnishings. He cites other visuals he loves: the cakes that come alive and attack in Young Sherlock Holmes (1985); the cereal scene from Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989) in which a tiny child bobbing in milk is almost eaten by his own father. Only later would I reflect on the other associations: the horror of being force-fed, or of being told that one wants something when one doesn’t. Once again, Marcon’s toxic blend of cruelty and comfort is at play. And it will be left to the audience to decide what they have seen: a childhood nightmare, a joke, a violation, or something they have watched and endured already, countless times before.
This article first appeared in frieze issue 250 with the headline ‘Diego Marcon’
Main images: Diego Marcon, Monelle (detail), 2017, production still. Courtesy: © Diego Marcon
