A Sureal Spell. Diego Marcon at Teatro Gerolamo

For twenty years, the “nomad museum” of Fondazione Nicola Trussardi has transformed streets, town squares and forgotten buildings by temporarily occupying them with the works and visions of important contemporary artists. This Spring, it’s the turn of Teatro Gerolamo, the marionette theatre known as "The Little Scala” for its minute dimensions and its stunning architectural details, designed in the 1800s by Giuseppe Mengoni. His fable-like atmospheres are the backdrop to the first institutional exhibition in Italy for Diego Marcon, author of mysterious chamber pieces in which puppets, children and creatures suspended between human and post-human move about. Mixing mellow-drama and special effects, in his films, videos and installations, Marcon imagines a new humanity agitated by profound doubts and trapped in agonising actions which repeat infinitely. Placed in this jewel of a theatre, the works of Marcon turn about themselves like ballerinas in a hypnotic carousel, evoking the micro-worlds of Joseph Cornell and the fantasies of Carlo Collodi and Lewis Carroll. The exhibition represents the height of a wealth of activity with which the Fondazione Trussardi celebrates the first twenty years of its nomad activity which has involved internationally famed artists such as Maurizio Cattelan, Martin Creed, Tacita Dean, Jeremy Deller, Ragnar Kjartansson, Sarah Lucas, Paul McCarthy, Thino Seghal and Nari Ward.