The Parents' Room
Solo exhibition: September 16–October 11 2021
Madre Museum, Via Luigi Settembrini, 79, 80139 Napoli NA, Italy
Site-specific installation: October 9 2021
Cinema King, Corso Vittorio Emanuele, 95, 91100 Trapani TP, Italy
Screening: November 2021
Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, Museumpark 24, 3015 CX Rotterdam, Netherlands
The Parents’ Room, a major new film work by Diego Marcon (b. 1985, Busto Arsizio, Italy), which premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes Film Festival, will be presented at the Madre - museo d’arte contemporanea Donnaregina, Naples, in a solo exhibition curated by Eva Fabbris and Andrea Viliani in September; by INCURVA in Trapani, Sicily, in October; and at the opening of Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, in November. The work also enters the permanent collection of the Madre.
The Parents’ Room is part of Marcon’s ongoing investigation into representations of reality through the destructuring of cinematic language. Exquisitely shot on 35mm film and soundtracked by an original musical score, composed by Federico Chiari and recorded at London’s Trinity School of Music, the film is a structuralist pastiche which eerily evokes the Golden Age of musical cinema and subverts codified genres like horror, slapstick comedy, musicals, and cartoons. As in Marcon’s previous works, most notably Monelle (2017) and Ludwig (2018), his interest in the more sombre realms of the human psyche is represented by the recurrent motif of childhood to evoke a primary, vulnerable human condition.
The Parents’ Room is a dark recital of tragedy and ambivalence. The narrative follows the operatic account of a man, perched on the edge of an unmade bed, who sings of the murders of his wife and two small children, and his own suicide. The mise-en-scene is peaceful; snow drifts past the open window and a blackbird’s song provides the melody for the father’s account. The juxtaposition of the domestic setting with the characters’ misfigured forms and the unfolding account of their twisted fate elicits feelings of confusion and revulsion. The employment of CGI effects and prosthetics gives rise to an uncanny, cartoonish characterisation. The hyper-realistic masks lend them a puppet-like form, rendering their movements reminiscent of stop-motion animation and further cultivating a distortion of reality that is characteristic of Marcon’s work.
The world premiere of The Parents’ Room was at Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight, the section dedicated to the most experimental and visionary practices in contemporary cinema. Subsequently, the work featured in the 32nd edition of FIDMarseille International Film Festival. Following the exhibition at the Madre museum in Naples, on October 9th, INCURVA will present a site-specific installation in a cinema and an artist talk in Trapani, Sicily, where Marcon undertook a residency in 2018 as part of the Curva Blu programme. In November the work will be shown at the Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.
In March 2021, the artist’s first monograph was published by Lenz Press. The monograph, titled Three Works, comprises a complete index of Marcon’s works alongside texts by Yann Chateigné-Tytelman, Eva Fabbris and Andréa Picard, and an interview with Federico Chiari, sound designer and composer of Marcon’s film scores. The artist’s working process is illustrated with the use of film frames, video stills, installation views and images. Three Works is edited by curator and art historian Eva Fabbris.
Co-produced by INCURVA (Trapani) and Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee - Museo Madre (Naples), the project is supported by the Italian Council (7th Edition, 2019), a programme by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture that promotes Italian contemporary art in the world. The film was produced in partnership with Primitive Film and FIDLab International co-production platform. The artist, the curators, INCURVA and Madre would like to extend special further thanks to ERMES ERMES, Rome-Vienna; and Fondazione In Between Art Film, Rome; Fondazione Memmo, Rome; and Gasworks, London.
Press contacts
Sam Talbot, sam [at] sam-talbot.com
Isabel Davies, isabel [at] sam-talbot.com
