Diego Marcon’s newest film/video work The Parents’ Room (2021) plays on a loop, with its beginning and end marked by a computer-generated blackbird swooping down onto a snowy windowsill. The scene moves into a room where a man sits on the edge of an unmade bed, a woman lying beside him. The man begins a choir-backed monologue detailing the story of his murder spree and suicide. The victims – his wife, daughter, and son – enter the scene one-by-one. The human element in this work – something one might find comfort in – is overcast by the dark shadow of what appears to be a chilling afterlife. The film is reminiscent of stop-motion animation, but Marcon creates this effect with live actors. Made from casts of the actors themselves, the synthetic prostheses they wear become eerie, inanimate doubles, such that there is something off about the animated figures – more corpse-like than living. Marcon’s works, like The Parents’ Room, Monelle (2017), and Ludwig (2018), enter the “uncanny valley,” where extreme representative realism evokes a response of repulsion and restlessness. Manipulating every element of the set, lighting, costume, sound, and script, Marcon creates characters that give the viewer goosebumps with simultaneous feelings of aversion and unsettling familiarity.
Isabella Achenbach
