Diego Marcon

After presenting Nari Ward’s Gilded Darkness at the outdoor and indoor spaces of the Centro Balneare Romano, in the Città Studi neighborhood, in the fall of 2022, President Beatrice Trussardi and Artistic Director Massimiliano Gioni continue with their mobile museum model, rediscovering and transforming streets, piazzas, palazzos, forgotten buildings, and symbolic places since 2003—temporarily occupying them with the works and visions of some of today’s most provocative artists.
For this new project they choose Teatro Gerolamo, a very small theatre-jewel formerly celebrated for the Colla Brothers’ puppet shows, rediscovered in the 1950s by legendary theater director Paolo Grassi and relaunched in the 1970s by writer Umberto Simonetta. Today Teatro Gerolamo still resonates with the memories of fairy tales and enchanted atmospheres, many of which find an uncanny symmetry in the works of Marcon.

Through films, videos, and installations, Marcon constructs mysterious chamber dramas inhabited by puppets, children, and creatures suspended between the human and post-human. Blending melodrama and special effects, the artist imagines a new humanity shaken by profound moral doubt and trapped in distressing, endlessly repeating actions. Presented in this miniaturized theater, Marcon’s works spin around like toy dancers in a hypnotic music box, evoking the micro-worlds of Joseph Cornell as well as the fantasies of Carlo Collodi and Lewis Carroll.

This year’s exhibition is part of a series of celebrations for the twentieth anniversary of the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi’s nomadic program, which will begin in April during Milan Art Week and miart.

Marcon’s project at Teatro Gerolamo is part of a series of key projects organized by the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, under the chairmanship of Beatrice Trussardi and the artistic direction of Massimiliano Gioni.

The Fondazione Nicola Trussardi is a private nonprofit that, like a mobile museum, revives forgotten places and symbolic spaces throughout Milan, inviting leading artists from the international scene to reinvent the city—imagining new uses for buildings, squares, churches, monuments, and other emblematic Milanese landmarks. Since 2003, the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi has produced public artworks, temporary exhibitions, incursions, performances, and pop-up interventions by renowned international artists, including Paweł Althamer, Allora & Calzadilla, Maurizio Cattelan, Martin Creed, Tacita Dean, Jeremy Deller, Elmgreen and Dragset, Urs Fischer, Fischli and Weiss, Gelitin, Ragnar Kjartansson, Sarah Lucas, Ibrahim Mahama, Paul McCarthy, Paola Pivi, Pipilotti Rist, Anri Sala, Tino Sehgal, Stan VanDerBeek, and Nari Ward, as well as presenting major themed exhibitions at Palazzo Reale and the Triennale.

The Nicola Trussardi Foundation activities are made possible thanks to the generosity of its founding members and “Il Cerchio”, a group of supporters who contribute to its projects.

The Diego Marcon’s exhibition is conceived and produced by the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi and made possible thanks to its efforts.