Diego Marcon. Dramoletti

Now in its twentieth year, the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi organizes a new exhibition for the city of Milan, continuing Beatrice Trussardi and Massimiliano Gioni’s mobile museum model that rediscovers and transforms streets, piazzas, palazzos, forgotten buildings, and symbolic places—temporarily occupying them with the works and visions of some of today’s most provocative artists.

From June 5 to 30, 2023, the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi presents Dramoletti, the first institutional exhibition in Italy by Diego Marcon (b. 1985, Busto Arsizio), one of the most engaging Italian artists of the current generation. For this new incursion into the fabric of the city, the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi has chosen Milan’s Teatro Gerolamo: a puppet theater famously known as “la piccola Scala,” by virtue of its miniature size and fine architectural details. It was designed in the nineteenth century by Giuseppe Mengoni—the same architect to create the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, where the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi started its nomadic project two decades ago. Formerly celebrated for the Colla Brothers’ puppet shows, the theater was 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.
 
Marcon’s exhibition 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. Its activities are made possible thanks to the generosity of its founding members and “Il Cerchio” of the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, a group of supporters who contribute to its projects.
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.

Diego Marcon (b. 1985, Busto Arsizio; lives in Milan) works with film, video, sculpture, and installation. His work has been featured in major international exhibitions—such as the 59th Venice Biennale (2022) and the Quadriennale d’arte FUORI, Rome (2020)—as well as in presentations staged by international public and private institutions such as Artspace, Auckland; Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard, Paris; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Institute of Contemporary Arts, Singapore; Matadero, Madrid; Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome; Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome; Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan; and the Triennale di Milano. His films have been screened at film festivals including the Directors’ Fortnight, Cannes Film Festival; International Film Festival Rotterdam; Cinéma du Réel, Paris; Courtisane, Ghent; BFI, London; and doclisboa, Lisbon. 
In 2018, Marcon was awarded the Fondazione Henraux Sculpture Prize and the MAXXI Bulgari Prize.
This year Marcon is preparing two other new solo shows at Kunsthalle Basel (Have You Checked the Children, October 27, 2023 – January 21, 2024) and at Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato (Glassa, September 30, 2023 – February 4, 2024).

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